"Thanksgiving: A Personal History"

In an essay focused on one holiday, Jennifer New chronicles how her attitudes towards family and home have changed throughout the years.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 10 Unit 2's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: Where I'm From, Funny in Farsi, Kaffir Boy, Pick One, If You Are What You Eat, Persepolis, poems about parents, Hunger of Memory, Thanksgiving: A Personal History, Time to Assert American Values, Rough Justice, On Civil Disobedience, On Surrender at Bear Paw Mountain, On Women's Right to Vote, Declaration of the Rights of the Child, School's Out for Summer, One Word of Truth, Hope, Despair, and Memory
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. evoke
    call forth, as an emotion, feeling, or response
    From the mythic Midwest of my childhood to the mesmerizing Chicago of later years, this holiday has always evoked a place.
  2. glut
    an overabundant or excessive supply
    I want to be free from both the material glut and the Pandora's box of emotions that opens every November and doesn't safely close until Jan. 2.
  3. sentry
    a person employed to keep watch for some anticipated event
    Farther up the road, a sentry-like boulder stood atop a hill, the final signpost before we pulled into my grandparents' lane.
  4. gaggle
    a flock of geese
    I see now that it would have been a great setting for gaggles of cousins: having pillow fights, trudging through the snowy woods, dressing up in my grandmother's old gowns and coonskin hat.
  5. restrained
    cool and formal in manner
    Thanksgiving supper, held in the dim light of late afternoon, was a restrained meal, as though it were a play and we had all lost our scripts.
  6. homage
    respectful deference
    My uncle and his partner Bob: willing themselves back home and beyond this annual homage.
  7. instill
    teach and impress by frequent repetitions or admonitions
    And, really, everyone else was there for us: to instill tradition in me, to uphold it for her.
  8. niche
    an enclosure that is set back or indented
    Not the boulder, the huge house with its secret niches nor even the golden turkey served on an antique platter that my grandmother unearthed every year from the depths of a buffet held any appeal.
  9. cynicism
    a pessimistic feeling of distrust
    Instead, I was stuck with one foot in cynicism and the other in hypersensitivity.
  10. macabre
    shockingly repellent; inspiring horror
    My great-grandmother, so tiny and helpless at this point, now struck me as macabre and frightening, her papery white skin on the verge of tearing.
  11. cacophony
    loud confusing disagreeable sounds
    The mezzanines of department stores--Lord & Taylor, Marshall Fields--dazzled me; the glint of light reflected on makeup-counter mirrors, the intoxicating waft of perfume on a cacophony of voices.
  12. hypocrite
    a person who professes beliefs that he or she does not hold
    Of course, like that adolescent hero, Holden Caulfield, I was that thing we hated most: a hypocrite.
  13. disdain
    lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense dislike
    I couldn't see the irony in my fascination with the urban splendor vs. my disdain for my grandparents' hard-earned home.
  14. connote
    express or state indirectly
    Instead, late November connoted the moneyed swirl of holiday lights flickering on the Magnificent Mile as an "El" train clamored over the Loop.
  15. immense
    unusually great in size or amount or extent or scope
    Far away from the immense quietude of the house in the woods, the bellhops now served as my uncles, shop clerks and waiters my cousins, and the patrons in theater lobbies and museums became my extended family.
  16. varying
    marked by diversity or difference
    After college, friends and I, waylaid on the West Coast without family, would whip up green-bean casserole and cranberries, reinventing the tastes of childhood with varying success.
  17. camaraderie
    the quality of affording easy familiarity and sociability
    There were always broken hearts and pining for home at these occasions, but they were full of warmth and camaraderie.
  18. eccentricity
    strange and unconventional behavior
    This was a family in which relatives existed in heaps, all appearing in boldface and underlined with their various eccentricities.
  19. neurosis
    a mental illness that makes you behave in an unusual way
    Neuroses and guarded secrets, petty jealousies and unpaid debts were all placed on the back burner for this one day while people reacquainted themselves, hugging away any uneasiness.
  20. claustrophobic
    uncomfortably closed or hemmed in
    This family--suburban, Jewish, bursting with noise and stories--so unlike my own, made me teeter between a thrilling sense of finally having a place at a long table, and a claustrophobic yearning for a quiet spot in a dark cafe.
Created on Sun Oct 12 15:04:08 EDT 2014 (updated Mon Oct 13 15:06:59 EDT 2014)

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