Every Thanksgiving I plan a “simple” holiday meal only to crash halfway through cooking it, because it wasn’t quite simple enough.

I’m tempted to skip the celebration, but holidays matter, just like good meals matter, even to solo cooks, the housebound, the ill. They remind us what we value; they allow us to share in our culture’s observances; they give us a chance to enjoy beautiful, once-a-year rituals.

But they’re a heck of a lot of work.

I normally downsize holidays: take the full, overwhelming shebang and reduce it to what I hope will be a manageable level with simpler recipes, fewer dishes, and more storebought items. But really, downsizing has never quite worked. Whatever I do is still more than I would typically do in a day–just washing the dishes, let alone cooking the meal. I end up overly tired and wondering whether next year I’ll even bother.

Downsizing also has negative undertones. You downsize by subtracting from something larger, and that can make me feel a little deprived–like what I’m doing is “less than” or second best, not what I would do if I were healthy. It can foreground the losses of illness.

This year I’m going to experiment with upsizing instead. I will add just one thing to my regular fare to give my meals the flavor of holiday. For 2019 that one thing will be cranberry sauce. (In fact, I’m not really doing any extra cooking–in my normal menu rotation, Wednesday is already sauce-making day.)

I might make a traditional sauce, or this Cuban-influenced one with cocoa, orange, and lime; or a family-favorite “salsa” with dried cranberries, orange, pecans, and red chile powder. They are all good on everything from oatmeal to sandwiches to baked apples. I might just eat cranberry sauce at all three meals, because if I’m going to do such a simple thing, I can go over the top with it.

That’s the thing about upsizing, about addition: you feel like you’re going over the top. Upsizing focuses on gain rather than loss, on the plenty you have rather than what you are missing, on abundance rather than scarcity. What you do is “more than;” it is extra, bonus, gratuitous.

And that sense of gift, of gratuity, is a first big step toward gratitude.