President Bidenfirst lady Jill Biden and members of their family are spending his final Thanksgiving holiday as president Nantucketaccording to family tradition.
Mr. Biden went to a fire station on Nantucket, as he has done in previous years. The family is staying at billionaire David Rubenstein’s home, where they have stayed for the past three years.
This year, daughter Ashley Biden and son Hunter Biden traveled with Mr. Biden and the first lady. Hunter’s wife Melissa and their four-year-old son Beau Jr. also traveled with them and other family members may be staying with the Bidens.
Beginning of the Biden family’s Nantucket tradition
The Biden family has been celebrating Thanksgiving in Nantucket for more than four decades. Mr. Biden wrote in his memoir “Promise Me, Dad” that “we had some great years during that period, and some bad years, but whatever happened, whatever bumps and bruises we had, we made it all set aside. and celebrated Thanksgiving in Nantucket.”
Jill Biden wrote in her memoir “Where the Light Enters” that the Bidens went to Nantucket when she and the president started dating.
“When Thanksgiving came, we knew we wanted to spend it together, but we didn’t know where,” she wrote. “My parents wanted us to be there, his parents wanted us to be there, and even Neilia’s parents had sent an invitation. We were touched and grateful, but it was stressful to think about choosing one family gathering over another, so I said, Joe, ‘Let’s go somewhere just the four of us.'”
Jill Biden said her husband’s then-chief of staff suggested Nantucket, which neither of them had ever been to, but she said they decided “it sounded as good as anything.”
Stephanie Scarbrough/AP
“I packed a cooler with sandwiches and soda, we loaded the boys into a station wagon and drove six hours to the Cape,” she writes. “On a crowded ferry to the island, we chugged past Brant Point’s beautiful lighthouse to the pier. Joe and I took a deep breath of salt air as we got our first view of the shingled cottages along the shore… That first one. We stayed in one of those houses for a year, right on the water, and paid a hundred dollars for the whole week.”
Jill Biden writes that Nantucket Thanksgiving became the family tradition for the next four decades. “With a few exceptions, we have made the trek every year since, creating rituals that would become an important part of our family along the way,” she writes.
“Once in Nantucket, we spend hours browsing the stores, and on the Friday after Thanksgiving we have lunch at the Brotherhood of Thieves restaurant. On Friday evenings we gather on cobblestone Main Street to see Santa Claus, to the big Christmas tree lighting ceremony and carol singing. And for years we posed for a family photo in front of a charming seaside cottage with the sign in front of it that read: FOREVER WILD.
Biden’s late son Beau proposed to his wife, Hallie, at the annual Christmas tree lighting in 2001, and they were married the following year at St. Mary’s Church in Nantucket.
“Hallie always suspected it was Beau’s way of locking them away forever at Biden Family Thanksgivings,” Biden wrote. ‘And it worked. At the end of the week they celebrated their twelfth anniversary, and Hallie had never missed a Thanksgiving. Even the year Beau was stationed in Iraq, she insisted that we all keep tradition and go to Nantucket.”
“The holiday trip was a constant in our grandchildren’s lives from the moment they knew it, and they made clear how much it meant to them,” Mr. Biden wrote.
Mr. Biden’s fateful conversation about the future with Beau and Hunter
Mr. Biden wrote in “Promise Me, Dad” that during the Thanksgiving weekend of 2014, when Beau was suffering from brain cancer, his decision about the 2016 presidential race weighed heavily on his mind.
Mr. Biden wrote that Beau told him in the kitchen in Nantucket, “Daddy, you’re wrong… you need to run. I want you to run.” He said Hunter agreed. “The three of us talked for an hour,” he wrote.
Mr. Biden ultimately decided not to run that cycle, and Beau Biden died on May 30, 2015 – making that year the last year the entire family spent the holidays together on Nantucket.
“No two Thanksgivings would ever be the same,” Biden wrote.
Bidens returns to Nantucket
Jill Biden wrote that the family went to Rome instead of Nantucket in 2015. “Nantucket was just another place to remind us of everything we had lost, like a photo with Beau’s face cut out.”
But she wrote that their grandchildren asked to return in 2016 was Nantucket. They missed the shops, the ice cream parlor where we always went, the traditional Friday lunch. They wanted to watch the Christmas tree lights and wander the cobblestone streets. They wanted to be together. To feel normal again.”
She wrote that they all “easily fell back into their old routines.”
Nantucket, she wrote, was “where we learned how to be a family—all the complicated storylines of birth and death, marriage and divorce, pain and healing, love and love and love, coming together in this little town on the edge of the world.”
Nantucket’s response to the Bidens
Jill Biden wrote in her memoir that when they drove down Main Street in 2016, the store windows were awash with signs that read “Welcome back, Bidens!”
According to the Nantucket Current, “over the past three years of Biden’s presidency, residents have become accustomed” to “downtown hotels and inns being booked solid by Secret Service personnel, security teams and White House reporters during what is normally a quiet holiday is for the island.”
“For the past three days, huge Air Force C-17s flew in and out of the airport dropping off vehicles and equipment, while nearly a dozen Massachusetts State Police Troopers arrived on motorcycles aboard the Steamship Authority ferry on Monday,” said the Nantucket Current. said. “Meanwhile, at Faregrounds Restaurant, Chef Bill Puder is cooking more than 200 turkey dinners for the Secret Service.”
Traffic and safety advisories have been drawn up for the Christmas tree lighting on Friday. In previous years they also participated in the Polar Bear Plunge on Friday.
