Every year, Americans gather for Thanksgiving, the great, cozy pause before November's end. To celebrate its sweetness, we caught up with five of our favorite FADER family members and asked them what they’re giving thanks for this holiday. Today, Alex Bleeker of Real Estate gives thanks.
I’m thankful for being in the backseat of the tour van because it’s a lounge seat and I get to lie down. On a more serious note, being born to my parents, who are cool, and to be from a really good town where I made a lot of friends and the arts were nurtured in general. Just being a fortunate person in suburban America, like, that is total roll of the dice dumb luck that I have this comfortable life I’m able to live. Tying into that, the year that we’ve been able to have musically—what we’ve been able to do with this record. In general, I’m thankful for the band. I love Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday other than Passover, which is like Jewish Thanksgiving in the Spring. My uncle has this house in the Catskills, it’s really sort of weird nostalgia for the Catskills, they used to be the Jewish center for the entertainment class in the ’50s and ’60s when my parents were kids. My uncle still lives up there…or he used to, he had a house and it was just really weird, like a ghost town. We used to go up there every Thanksgiving and have this hilarious Seinfeld-esque disaster where they didn’t buy the turkey in time, or it was just like a total failure. One year we fried a turkey there and we had this 20 pound vat of vegetable oil and we dipped the turkey into it and it cooked in 40 minutes. It was awesome. It was raining. It’s really dangerous, and that’s really indicative of who my uncle is, because he’d just have this flaming pot of hot oil. You have to go outside your house to do it—the directions specifically say that because people burn down their houses trying to do this. We were like 40 feet away from their house, we had an umbrella covering the vat of oil and we’re all lowering this turkey into it. It was awesome and was maybe one of the first times I got drunk with my family and realized what holidays are all about in this weird way. You’re old enough and they’re giving you all this shitty wine and you’re drunk by six o’clock and you realize you’re drunk and your parents are drunk and everyone’s getting ridiculous. When you’re a kid, you don’t really get it. You’re like, what are they doing up there just talking and laughing and singing songs from old television shows. It’s something so foreign to you as a kid, and then you listen to yourself do it, and that’s like all you do with your friends.
