Adam hates Thanksgiving. "There aren't even presents!" he grumbles, just like he has every year since he was five. "The best holidays have presents. We never even got to celebrate Christmas growing up, so I'm present deprived."

"Hanukkah has eight nights of presents, douche," says Neil. "You're so greedy."

Last Thanksgiving, Adam had punched Neil in the face by the end of the meal. This year, he doesn't know if he'll make it that far.

Some things are constant: like the Macy's Day parade. But some things, like the floats in the parade, still catch him by surprise.

1 1/4 cups pecan halves

2 1/2 cups couscous, preferably whole wheat

1 1/4 teaspoons fine sea salt, plus more to taste

1/2 cup plus 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

1/4 cup finely chopped scallions, white and green parts

1 fat garlic clove, minced

1 teaspoon Turkish red pepper or Aleppo pepper

1 1/4 cups chopped parsley

4 large eggs.

Steve makes the air marshal the moment they get on the plane: 17D, Sport Fishing, clean-shaven, Sig Sauer P229 under his jacket. He settles in his own seat – 18K; an aisle, with Danny at the window – and takes a moment to calculate the best, second-best, and last-call routes to the marshal and his gun. Glancing up, he checks the overheads for broken hinges, locks, and suspicious packages; he finds the motion-sickness bag in his seat pocket, and assesses which flight attendants have the upper body strength to throw a punch.

"You figure out your escape plan yet?" Danny asks.

Mom has a new joke, which she has repeated all evening on the phone to other family members. "If the Pilgrims had eaten donkey meat we'd all be celebrating Thanksgiving by having a piece of ass." This is the woman who, in my childhood, screamed at me for being "rude, crude, and socially unacceptable". Can't imagine where I acquired those traits.

The pumpkin pie we usually do in the North of Greece, is a really simple thing: you take a layer of fyllo pastry, butter/oil it, add a layer on top, butter/oil it, and do so five times (so, five fyllos at the bottom....) Then you add the filling: chopped and drained bits of pumpkin, a cup of sugar, cinammon to taste and crushed nuts (walnuts are the most traditional, but you can put whatever you want... they are optional, really, but good for texture). Finally, another five buttered/oiled fyllos go on top. Bake in a medium-high oven until it's all nice and golden on top - and cooked on the inside (my mum never tells me for how much time I'm supposed to bake something: she's always like 'oh, about an hour, but you'll see it, you'll know when it's done....' *g*) Serve with icing sugar on top and you're done!