Jennifer Aniston is blessed, indeed.
"My husband, who's been away for almost a year it feels, surprised me on Thanksgiving and came home from Germany. It was really sweet," the Office Christmas Party star, who married Justin Theroux in the summer of 2015, said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Wednesday. "We had just been together the week prior; I was going to London to do some work. His schedule was apparently 'completely booked' for the week, and he wasn't going to be able to come back."
In years past, the couple hosted a dinner the night before Thanksgiving, she explained. "We call it 'Fakesgiving' or 'Friendsgiving.' It's for all the orphans—people who don't have places to go."
Thinking Theroux would be abroad, Aniston decided to host the dinner on her own this year. "Everyone came to the house and no one really understood that Justin was not going to be there. And you just saw everybody's face just start to fall. The whole room was depressed," the actress said. "I was like, 'Guys, I'm here! OK? I understand Justin's not here, but it's going to be OK! We'll have it next year.' I gave the toast at the head of the dinner table, which is usually me and Justin. I gave a very, I guess, unimpressive toast where people were like, 'Oh, yeah. Great.'"
When salads were served, "Everyone was just very somber. "Next thing you know," she said, "turkey walks in and there was another turkey holding that turkey. And that was my hubby."
Theroux had to fly back to Germany on Sunday, but Aniston just grateful he'd gone out of his way to surprise her on Thanksgiving. "We got a good couple days," she told Ellen DeGeneres.
Later on, DeGeneres brought up the op-ed piece that Aniston wrote for The Huffington Post. "I did it at first really for myself just to sort of...you know how we write and don't necessarily send it? Or, at least when I was a kid I did that. And yeah, I kind of hit a wall," Aniston said. "I was pretty raw at the time. Just came back from a vacation and my mother, she passed. It was really an extraordinary experience in time, and so I was really thrown by all of [the media attention]."
While on a private vacation with Theroux, Aniston was photographed in a bikini, leading some tabloids to speculate she was pregnant with her first child. Later, after the couple returned to L.A., Aniston recalled, "We were mobbed—like a scary kind of mob. I didn't know what was happening. I kept thinking, 'Is Kim Kardashian behind me or something? This is very strange.' And then it turns out [there was] another wonderful photograph, which I've had to sort of live with for the last 10 to 15 years: a picture of me with a bump and a circle around my stomach with an arrow pointing to it, in this sort of kind of objectifying way. I was just fed up with it."
Aniston urged The Ellen DeGeneres Show's viewers to stop reading tabloids. "All of us need to take responsibility on what we ingest into our brains," the actress said. "Just because we are women, we have a uterus, we have a vagina, we have ovaries, we need to 'get to work, lady!'"
"We, as women, do a lot of incredible things in this world other than just procreate. And not that that is not [incredible], but we just get boxed in," she said. "They love the narrative. They love the story. They love the she's jealous of this person, and she's depressed. And oh, my gosh—she's never going to have a [baby]. Whatever the horrible little headline is, we've just got to break out of that and go, 'Woah! Woah!' And women, I have to say, are many of the authors of these horrible articles that are written in these B.S. tabloids. So, we have to stop listening to them. We have to stop buying them because we have to support each other, especially at this time, to love each other, to support and to be proud of women whatever your choice is in life."
Aniston added, "It's up to us what makes us happy and fulfilled."
She may have been fired up at the time, but more often than not, Aniston tends to rely on humor in tough times. For example, after she and DeGeneres suited up to play a game called Sumo Charades, the host quipped, "I think the pregnancy rumors are going to start again." As Aniston waddled onstage in an inflatable sumo wrestler suit," she joked, "I've got a lot in here!"
"She's got a bump!" DeGeneres shouted. "She's got a baby bump!"
"Uh-oh!" Aniston laughed. "Circle it!"