Hi, in case you didn’t know: The single most important piece of holiday pop culture is hiding in plain sight on your Netflix homepage right now. Yes, it’s Gossip Girl. And ten years ago, this show gave us the ultimate hour-long saga into elite family ~scandal~ with its season three Thanksgiving episode, “The Treasure of Serena Madre.” (Yes, it is better than “Blair Waldorf Must Pie!”)
As the voiceover of Kristen Bell softly coos, “On the Upper East Side, that tradition is upheld with a bountiful harvest of secrets, lies and scandals.” And oh sh*t is this truly everything my fourteen-year-old (and current twenty-four year-old) pop culture loving, drama-chasing, New York City-kid brain ever wanted.
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This, right here, is Gossip Girl at its best. I mean, the drama! The wealth! The Jason Derulo! The elevator hookups! The Eric van der Woodsen shade! It’s juicy in a way that the turkey in the middle of my grandmother’s dining room table would never even know (side note: turkey is bland, let’s find another Thanksgiving food.) And speaking of tables, this is the most crowded Thanksgiving table that network television has ever seen. No, don’t fact-check me on that one.
The CW
Seated at the table you got the main gang: Dan (who, lest you forgot, is Gossip Girl 😒), Serena, Nate, Chuck, and the hatband queen herself, Blair Waldorf. Oh! And then throw in Vanessa post-threesome with Dan and vampire movie star Hilary Duff (!!), Eric and Jenny who are hellbent on destroying each other with bland sweet potatoes, Rufus and Lily who are *supposed* to be chillin’ in wedded bliss, Vanessa’s mom Gabriela, Lily’s mom CeCe (whose heart “pumps secrets and gin”), a maybe-pregnant (read: no, she’s not) Eleanor Waldorf. Finally, it’s all topped off with Tripp Vanderbilt and his wife, Maureen. Tripp, if you’ve forgotten, is Nate’s young and dashing congressman cousin who is sleeping with Serena, his college-aged intern who has a very complicated relationship with Nate. Woof, that’s cool.
To catch ya up to speed here, a newly-married Lily and Rufus are hosting Thanksgiving at the newly blended Humphrey-van der Woodsen household, Serena, as mentioned, is sleeping with Tripp who is married to Maureen. Blair thinks her mother is pregnant and is trying to get her to admit it and Jenny found out Eric ruined her cotillion. Oh, and Dan may or may not be in love with Vanessa. So! Many! Moving! Pieces! And that’s *before* we get to the climax of the whole damn show.
And while the episode itself as a whole, admittedly, does less for the entire six-season arc of the show than “Blair Waldorf Must Pie”, it packs in everything you’ve ever wanted from the show in just three minutes and forty-three seconds. Yes my fellow Upper East Siders, I am talking about the dining room scene.
You know what, I’ll just let you take in this clip and you can see for yourself because I’m just gonna go and rewatch the ep right now:
So, as you sit down with your family this holiday season and you reflect on what you’re thankful for and how you want to look ahead into the new decade, remember this: f*ck Tripp Vanderbilt. He knows what he did.
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