As long as I could remember my parents have welcomed people who had nowhere else to go on holidays over to our home for dinner. I called it the "Lonely Hearts Club" when I was in high school. As a teenager overly concerned with outward family appearances, it was enough for me to tolerate my own kin, let alone the strangers my parents brought in. In attendance at Thanksgiving and several times in December throughout the years were: colleagues whose families lived far away, friends of friends who were already invited, friends who had broken from their own family unit for whatever reason, and neighbors my parents had befriended. How overly sentimental of us, how unattractively vulnerable that makes my parents, the teenage me thought. After all, holidays are about family - the people to whom you are blood-related. Period.

My first year in college, I became friends with people who had moved from out of town to go to school in San Diego. My best friend, Kim who had moved to Colorado in eleventh grade came back to study at the University of San Diego and spent as much time living with us as she did her dorm room-mates. Sure enough, other friends of mine began to transition out of their own family and had nowhere to go for Thanksgiving, not to mention the friends who couldn't afford to travel home for both Turkey Day and December break.

"Why don't you just come over to my house?" I found myself saying to my friends, with enthusiasm I didn't quite understand. Did I just say that? Who am I? Mirror mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all.

The addition of my friends at Thanksgiving meant more food, gallons and gallons more Coca-Cola, more chairs, more everything. It also meant I'd be eating humble pie in addition to pecan pie. I was more than a little reluctant to advertise my hypocrisy, and own vulnerability, to my parents. I approached the topic carefully, with as little room for discussion as possible.

"Mom, can Kim and Amy and maybe a few other friends come over for Thanksgiving dinner [no pause in between words, no stop for breath or retort]? THANKYOUMOMILOVE YOUMOM!"

Mom didn't retort. She just smiled, like some pre-destined event had come to pass.

The thought of someone being all by  themselves over the holidays, of eating a turkey-mashed potato-corn Hungry Man dinner in a dining hall alone began to thaw the ice queen that was my teenage self. The teenage self who was so concerned with what outsiders thought that I would rather have an empty home come Thanksgiving.

I don't really know when it occurred, but my own need for fellowship, my own sense of compassion leapt out of me in a November in the late 80s, about the time I was supposed to start thinking like an adult, around the time of year comfort food materialized in my Mom's kitchen. It's the first Thanksgiving I remember being excited for more than food and the good movies on television. I was anxious to share our holiday family traditions with my friends, with my parent's friends, with everyone.

"Come over!" I would say, "It's so much fun at my parents, a ton of people come, we watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, my Mom screams at my dad over giblet gravy and then my Dad and I fight over turkey skin." Now wouldn't that make you want to go over to someone's house? It worked for the crowd we attracted.

I am thirty-six years old now. I have worked in Catering and have a penchant for throwing dinner parties that grow exponentially in size closer to the date of the function. I have learned what goes into a holiday production. It's more than scrambling for extra chairs or finding an open burner for reducing pan gravy. It's an open house with culinary traditions and surrender to emotional attachments.

My parents still host the holidays at their home. Nothing really has changed except for the pictures on the walls that frame the faces of my children instead of me. The old friends, the colleagues, the remaining members of the Lonely Hearts Club say to me "Before you know it, they'll be teenagers!" Oh heavens, No! What if they're like me, what will I do? Wait for them to come around and feed them mashed potatoes, I suppose.

But it would make sense (in case I wanted more humble pie) if my children fear they'll be made fun of for having a non-judicious family, the way I did. It seems to be human nature, the reluctance to show vulnerability. The holidays have a way of exposing it, in people of all ages.

But everyone comes from a family. No family is perfect, no matter what the magazines or commercials try to sell you. Really, we're all on equal playing ground. We've all spent enough holidays with family and friends - playing ball in between dinner and dessert, cleaning up messes, fighting over food or politics, burping babies, and enjoying good fortune to know - even if we try to deny it - what is important.

Family (apparently not just the people to whom we're blood-related) and of course, the food.

Come November and December, the whole world could be a Lonely Hearts Club. We all need love; we all need to be fed. The holidays give us the opportunity to reach out, to be reached, and to comfort. In our home, we make the world less lonely one pie slice at a time, year after year, one by one.