UK Immigrant Turns NYC Holiday Wallflower Into Full-Friendriarchy

KEY POINTS

•Jane Ridley's family lives 3,000 miles away in Northern England, so holidays were mostly just her small immediate family.
•In 2020, COVID restrictions forced Jane to expand her Thanksgiving guest list, inviting friends alongside her au pair from Chile.
•The gathering grew from four to nine people, with games and stories that made holidays lively and relieved Jane's homesickness.
•Inspired by that success, Jane now regularly invites friends and their acquaintances for every holiday celebration, ditching the old family-only formula.

Jane Ridley, a 28-year-old international student au pair from Chile, plus an impromptu Brooklyn train jumper, crashed what was once a shamefully slender Thanksgiving party in suburban New York. The Ridley clan had suffered through 20 years of distant transatlantic family dynamics and painfully intimate 4-person holiday dinners featuring midwestern football that sparked zero joy (or at least none Jane admitted). Thanks to COVID's most benevolent side-effects, 2020 boasted seven place settings when Jane’s au pair and her crew expanded the festivities from sad to lively, complete with English parlor games replacing child bickering and spiritual homesickness. Now, Thanksgiving no longer rhymes with loneliness—and Jane’s already readying her guest list for next week.