Skip the Forced Family Fun and Volunteer This Thanksgiving

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Seriously, this Thanksgiving, would you rather 1) endure awkward conversations with those cousins with whom you have nothing in common, and yet another interrogation about your life choices from your grandmother, or 2) help out the homeless, the infirm, and people whose homes were destroyed during Hurricane Sandy?

If your answer is 2), we’ve got a couple of links for you.

New York Magazine has a list of churches, synagogues, community centers and organizations – like God’s Love We Deliver, a meals-on-wheels organization that brings food to home-bound people with AIDs and other serious illnesses.

And over at The Awl, Emily Gould has an interview with the woman who coordinates meal prep and delivery for the soup kitchen at Greenpoint Reformed Church. In it, she links to Occupy Sandy’s pages on volunteering and donating for the holiday.

Here, you can learn about volunteering at Occupy Sandy’s big Thanksgiving dinner for survivors at St. Marks Church in the East Village.

And if you can’t make it tomorrow, you can go here to chip in for the dinner.

If your answer is 1), we have no advice for you.

Sari Botton is a writer living in upstate New York. She is the editor of Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and more retrograde women’s magazines than she’d care to recall or admit to. She tweets at @saribotton. More from this author →