The leaves part sounds nice. The rest seems utterly foreign. When I was 13, the grandparent died and the car was stolen, neither replaced, and since then every Thanksgiving has been spent in Manhattan. The very words don't sit well together. The occasion feels less reverent, less familial somehow than it does in the rest of the country, more like a party.
Restaurants plug their costly five-course menus.
Allegedly there's a parade, broadcast around the country and enjoyed by millions, but I've never seen evidence of it. Once, when I was one year out of college, a visiting roommate suggested we go watch the giant balloons being blown up near the Natural History museum the night before the feast. The native New Yorkers in the room stared at her blankly. Among local families I knew, it wasn't uncommon for the whole feast to be ordered from Zabar's, the Manhattan Ur-deli. In my family, my English-born mother valiantly cooked for a holiday not her own, donning an orange apron, shooing everyone out of the kitchen and helping herself liberally to sherry along the way.