In arguably one of the most classic Thanksgiving episodes of the five (and it’s rather staggering to consider that the show found Thanksgiving drama a central part of almost all six seasons) to choose from in the Gossip Girl oeuvre, it is the first season’s inaugural Turkey Day episode—“Blair Waldorf Must Pie!”—that reels us in with regard to the significance of the holiday in the hyper-caricaturized world of these privileged Upper East Siders. After all, no one loves ignoring the complicated history of Thanksgiving more than white people of means. It’s also a day when “Gossip Girl,” as she puts it, “trades her laptop for stovetop” (or so she claims while still dishing out gossip). For Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), the stovetop holds no appeal, if only because it means she’ll have to vomit up whatever’s on it later.
With the majority of her high-running emotions tied to scarfing and barfing, Thanksgiving is a major trigger. Not only because it’s a naturally neurotic time as one is forced to spend “quality” family time, but because Blair can now only associate the holiday with her father, who has since left her mother, Eleanor (Margaret Colin), for another man named Romain. Structured as a flashback episode interwoven with the present, we look back at Blair’s final Turkey Day spent in a non-broken home in 2006 (the “present” then being 2007). It is her mother’s underhanded shunning of her father the following year that leads Blair back down the path of her eating disorder, which she had previously managed to curb (side note: Gossip Girl was way ahead of The Crown showcasing Diana’s bulimia).
It all starts when Serena (Blake Lively) blatantly judges her for confessing to losing her virginity to Chuck (Ed Westwick) in retaliation for Nate (Chace Crawford) betraying her (with Serena, as it were)—setting off part of the reason why Serena flees New York for a year. As the two bicker about their relative sluttiness, Blair uninvites her after their friendship was only just mended. Between this and finding out her mother manipulated her father into not flying out from Paris to spend Thanksgiving with them, Blair takes an entire pie, runs to the kitchen and proceeds to eat-cry (eating while crying) the entire thing as a barrage of flashbacks of past bulimic moments occur.
In many ways, the decision to have Blair, a girl of so much privilege “waste food” (a dangerous way to phrase it that only causes further shame and self-loathing to bulimics) in this way feels like a pointed choice for a narrative about rich kids living in an Upper East Side bubble. Set against the backdrop of the excess of Thanksgiving on its own, the disorder takes on a new depth in terms of profligate white kids with no limit to what their desires are. For Blair, the desire is to purge. Almost as though, deep down, she knows that the existence she has been born into is vomit-worthy, yet she must work to uphold the image of poise and self-importance that her own mother has conditioned her to continue as part of the Waldorf legacy.
So perhaps that’s why “keeping it all down” is difficult—because that level emotional suppression is bound to come out in some other way. Luckily, Blair is self-aware enough to know when to confess to her yakking sins, calling upon Serena in the present (now that’s she’s not drunk off her ass anymore after 2006’s shenanigans) despite their fresh fight.
At the end of the episode, she thanks her bestie for “the sandwich,” making a vow to call Dr. Sherman in the morning. But that’s just another benefit of being a bulimic of affluence: you can always summon one of the best doctors of the Upper East Side to cure you of your ills, hop you up on pills (at one point, Blair remarks, “I’m in a good mood—it happens. Sometimes because I increase my Lexapro, sometimes because my dad’s in town”) and look for new ways to purge that don’t come out so literally. Particularly on a day as hallowed for white folk as Thanksgiving.
