Thanksgiving Day Smolders

I don’t do Thanksgiving anymore. I haven’t done it in about 10 years or so. However, my partner and I are bringing a bird (chicken) to his elderly parent’s house because his mother just got home from the hospital. The family (my children, except for the youngest who is studying in Italy, her father‘s grandfather and grandmother’s homeland) are going to their Nana’s house to make a turkey but I think it’s going to be a lot different for them. Nana was big on holidays. Not like me. Well, that’s not true, when my children were young I spent hours and hours on holidays and their attendant traditions and decorum. But something in me had to stop, mostly when I divorced my children’s father.

Well, I never really divorced him back then because it was too complicated. We’ve just lived apart for the past 10 years and only recently went through the legal rigmarole. I started taking my children out to dinner or something for some of the holidays, trying to make a new tradition that fit more realistically into a family headed by a single mother who worked up to three jobs at one time. It just made more sense. But I can’t say it stuck.

Today though I’m pushing myself to put my own pursuits aside for a couple of hours; I will go to my partner’s parent’s house. I don’t like holidays because to me they represent so many things that I don’t much believe in. I wasn’t surprised either when my anthropology professor called Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning for indigenous peoples of America. Somehow, I always knew that. But still, I’ll push myself to make an appearance and smile for others because Jack, my partner, bought a fully cooked chicken and potatoes from the grocery store so I am only cooking up some winter squash.

It’s not that I don’t like cooking. I cook everyday, like I did when the children were little, but I just have a problem with the holidays. Someday I may come to terms with them, understand why I dislike them so much, but for now, I’m just winging parts of them and pushing myself through other parts of holiday routines that just won‘t give up the ghost. But here’s one little anecdote that may express some of my feelings:

This morning Jack took a stack of ads out of the newspaper that is nearly two inches thick and left the wafer thin mint of newsprint on the coffee table. There is more stuff to sell than there is news to read. To me, that’s the best commentary on what the holidays have become. And I used to be a reporter and copywriter for seven regional newspapers. Commerce wins every time. As they say in journalism: follow the money when you’re investigating wrongdoing.

(On an aside, I’ll tell you the dream thoughts I had last night. I kept waking up dreaming about deleting this blog, especially my free-writing rants from the past two days. But instead, I’m just adding a new one. I suppose I don’t always trust all my dreams. I‘m pushing to find a new kind of writing even though I don‘t know exactly what it is. In the dream I was doing it right but I couldn‘t see what I was doing--because in real life I still don‘t know what it is.)