In general, I celebrate Thanksgiving because I celebrate the food. I celebrate the food, the time I get to spend with my family cooking and eating and talking, and I celebrate the yearly hope that this day will be accompanied by something like Ben Hur or Spaceballs playing softly on the TV in the background.

These are the parts of the day that I wish wouldn't change. I want to wear my slippers and jammies as I cook, split up the food to-do's with my Mom, and I want to see the pots of yams and cranberries boiling over on my parents' flat top range; the liquid from each simultaneously creating bursts of steam and splattered puddles which crust over as they singe onto the stove surface.

We'll whip the potatoes, skins and all, and my Mom will insist on making a fruit salad, no matter what else we've made or how late we're running (and I will thank her later in the evening for that fresh reprieve from an otherwise very rich meal) and I will work the pieces of phyllo dough for our spinach pie like delicate ivory bed sheets; wrapping them around my Yaiyai's traditional mixture of spinach and cheese and covering it all in a warm dripping of melted butter until it resembles very much the size and shape of a comfy bedroom pillow - nothing smells quite like the baking of my Yaiyai's spinach pie. It's a smell, that along with that of a roasting turkey, has come to be synonymous with all of my Thanksgivings growing up (truth be told, spinach pie is made for every special occasion at our house, but I digress.)

And while there are many things about this holiday that I would rather not change, there are definitely things that could benefit from a fresh touch. I've started doing little things at home in recent years to break with the traditional foods and preparation methods we generally employ for Thanksgiving, like making another Greek dish to go with our regular meal like keftedes perhaps, or trying a couple different kinds of stuffing or a new dessert; but while my Mom and Dad welcome invention in the kitchen as long as it tastes good, we still always make the old stand-bys - just so we have them.

This year, my boyfriend and I each pitched the idea of serving individual stuffed Cornish hens at our Thanksgiving dinners rather than the giant turkey - and we were both promptly shut down. It seems that while we may have some wiggle room with the side dishes, there is no getting away from the space-hogging, all-day cooking, potentially very dry, dry, tryptophan-filled prospect of turkey. There appears to be no way around it. It was essentially the same answer from both my parents and his: don't mess with our turkeys.

Okay, okay. This year, your turkeys stay (and don't get me wrong, I like a good turkey as much as the next struggling vegetarian), but we are going to rock the pants off those side dishes. To start, let's run down the list of the usual suspects:

• Whipped potatoes • Green salad • Fruit Salad • Yams • Green beans • Spinach pie (insert your family's traditional specialty here) • Bread & butter • Gravy • Cranberry relish

Barring a few personal revisions that will vary from household to household, the dishes listed above generally comprise what one would recognize to be the side dishes at a traditional Thanksgiving meal.

From this list, I realize that I will have to pick my battles. Compromises will have to be made. I understand that there can be no errant bananas showing up in the fruit salad (even though I love them) at my Dad's request, and that the green beans must remain pretty straight-forward as they are my brother's favorite. But as I scan this list, I find myself drawn toward tackling what is generally the most underappreciated yet stubbornly present offering at the Thanksgiving table: the cranberry relish.

Yes, I will bring local Farmer's Market greens and vegetables to the table to invigorate our green salad, and I will buy at least one loaf of cranberry pecan bread from Zingerman's to add some life to our bread and butter selection, and I will probably even threaten the sanctity of our potatoes with fresh garlic and herbs (and don't think I've forgotten about you, yams), but the cranberry relish really does need all the help it can get.

Much like the clarinet in musical arrangements, the cranberry relish in a Thanksgiving Day spread goes underappreciated and often unnoticed as its steadfast, comforting presence is in many ways overshadowed by the more flashy attributes of its tablemates. Who notices the cranberry relish anymore these days? Well, me.

I started noticing the cranberry relish the first time that I took it upon myself to make it. Using a well-worn, well-loved recipe that my Mom had gotten from my Aunt Debbie, I ventured into the world of cranberry cookery. The recipe calls for apples and orange zest, cranberries and sugar, and it's not really something you know how to alter to fit your taste until you've made it once or twice. Now having done that the past couple of years, I am going to attempt to perfect something I tried for the first time last Thanksgiving: making this recipe my own.

Am I talking about a completely new approach that shuns the past and ditches tradition in the pursuit of something hyper-new a la molecular gastronomy like cranberry foam or a liquid nitrogen infused cranberry ice? No. I think that as with any step forward in the great continuum of change on this planet, we must be wise enough and humble enough to learn from those who have come before us. My Aunt Debbie is an excellent cook, and so, I am going to use her recipe as a template to pair our traditional cranberry relish with my new addition: the elegant flavor notes of the vanilla bean.

Not being trained as a chef, I do not have a history on call in my mind for the past pairings of the cranberry and the vanilla bean, but the idea of the union came to me last year, and it just seemed, well, natural.

So, for a family of four like ours, half of the original recipe would work, and I encourage you to play around with your own ideas of what the greatest cranberry relish in the world for you would be when making this at home. Please keep in mind that this is a work in progress, so make at your own risk, but what is cooking if not an exercise in experimentation?

Here is the general template for my version of the recipe:

• 1 bag of cranberries (you can find local ones this time of year) • ¼ - ½ tsp. of orange zest (more to taste if you prefer) • 2 apples, diced (the only stipulation here is to not use any red delicious) • ½ - ¾ cup of sugar (this can actually get very sweet very fast - test it) • The insides of 2 vanilla beans • 1 tsp. ground cinnamon • A pinch fresh grated nutmeg

The process after that is simple:

Rinse the cranberries and pick out the "nurds", which are the white ones and the rotten ones, etc. Combine the cranberries and orange zest in a saucepan with water to just cover the cranberries (some may float up as you cook, and oftentimes they are the bad ones, so it makes them easy to pick out.)

Bring the cranberries to a boil, then put the apples in the pan as well. As the concoction is boiling, you may have to add more water at times. Just keep an eye on it as it cooks.

Add the sugar after and stir constantly.

This is also where I add my vanilla bean scrapings.

Next, my Mother made a notation on my Aunt's recipe to add "1 whole teaspoon of cinnamon" at this point, and I would add to that the slightest bit of fresh grated nutmeg.

Turn the heat down to a simmer and let it reduce a bit until it becomes more syrupy. The cranberries will split open while cooking, and once this has happened to all of them, you'll need approximately 1 more minute of cook time, then the cranberries can be taken off the heat.

The mixture will thicken as it cools, so bear that in mind, but you want to cook it enough to where it's the consistency of warm honey before you pull it off the heat.

It feels like I am coming to a point in my life where it is time to start new traditions, but as always, still honor the ones that I was raised with. Creating my own cranberry relish may be a small step on the way to culinary change on the big family holidays, but who knows? Maybe next year we'll have Cornish hens.