Far and away, Thanksgiving is the most important day of the year. Or so it would seem from the weight placed upon the holiday by my mother. Skip heading home to California for nearly any other event, and she won’t bat an eye. But my brother or I miss Thanksgiving dinner? That’s a hanging offense.

So, per usual, I’m off to San Francisco to eat turkey. This year, however, I’m dragging Jess in tow. Because while I’ve met her parents a few times (due to their proximity in nearer Boston), she’s yet to meet mine.

I’ve gone back and forth between thinking that this week is a wonderful or a terrible time for that first meet-up, unsure whether the collective preparatory push of cooking and cleaning and table-setting will give us something to focus on other than the inherent weird awkwardness, or simply leave everyone even further on stressed-out edge, compounding the mess of it all.

Whichever it is, however, we land in SFO in about an hour; it seems I’ll soon find out.