President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, helped a local food kitchen prepare Thanksgiving meals for the needy before leaving town — like millions of other Americans — to resume their family tradition of spending the holiday on tiny Nantucket island in Massachusetts.
Watch Psaki's remarks in the player above.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, joined the outing to DC Central Kitchen, which serves cooked-from-scratch meals alongside training for culinary jobs.
The Bidens were still dating when they first visited Nantucket, with Biden's sons, Beau and Hunter, in the mid-1970s. The couple was looking for a way out of choosing which of their families to spend Thanksgiving with, the First Lady wrote in her memoir.
Biden was a U.S. senator back then and his chief of staff suggested they go to Nantucket.
"And although neither Joe nor I had ever been, we decided that sounded as good as anywhere," she wrote. So they packed a cooler with sandwiches and sodas, loaded the boys into the station wagon and drove six hours to the Cape, where a ferry chugged them over to the island.
Thanksgiving on "Nana-tucket" — as their grandchildren call the island in a play on their "Nana" nickname for their grandmother — became the family tradition for the next several decades, though with a few exceptions, the first lady wrote.
Last fall, Biden put tradition on hold over COVID-19 concerns, when people were being told to avoid traveling and gathering indoors in large groups for the holidays. Instead, the then-president-elect hunkered down for Thanksgiving with just his wife, their daughter and her husband.
Both the president and first lady since have received the main two-dose course of the Pfizer vaccine, as well as the third booster shot recommended by public health officials to provide more enduring protection against the coronavirus.
The White House has not said how Biden, who turned 79 last Saturday, plans to spend his time on Nantucket.
Asked during her Tuesday briefing about the trip, White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the president's decision to leave Washington for the holiday by saying that Thanksgiving "is a time to put politics aside, spend time with your loved ones and talk about what you're grateful for."
She also noted that Biden is president wherever he is.