Midnight musings: The problem with Thanksgiving
I don’t like Thanksgiving. Not for the obvious reasons, like how much shopping and cooking you do and then are too tired to eat.
My dislike of Thanksgiving goes back to the days of being a kid in a big family. For all major holidays, we’d go to my cousins’ house or they’d come to ours, adding their family of seven (one girl, six boys) to our family of three boys and six girls. No good can ever come from that.
Every year, we put on a Thanksgiving play, with all the kids taking roles of Pilgrims, Indians, turkeys, and for the less verbal, ears of corn. For too many years as a preteen and then a teenager, I was in charge of writing and directing this play. There wasn’t enough aspirin in the world at the end of it.
My older sister, the other “good girl,” had been in charge before me and passed down the responsibility with delight. My girl cousin and I were the middle kids, with eight kids younger than us. Six were boys who refused to remember or recite any lines. Apathy was a problem as was complaining. “Why do we have to do this stupid play every year?” was heard so often, it could’ve been a refrain and a line not in the script.
There was also diva-ness. We had one legitimate Pilgrim costume that my sister had sewn for me for Halloween one year and the girls fought over it. Who wanted to wear a construction paper hat when you could wear a costume that looked like it was straight out of “The Crucible”? The adults, of course, loved the play and I tiredly accepted their praise when it was over. “You did such a good job! This was the best one ever!” they’d gush. “You’ll do it again next year, won’t you?”
If I had to run away from home before then, I wouldn’t hesitate.
Dinner was a 25-pound turkey, snowbank-sized bowls of mashed potatoes, frozen corn, Mandarin oranges and fruit cocktail encased in green Jell-O — my uncle joked that no family party was complete without Jell-O) — and canned cranberry sauce. It sat jiggling on its white china plate, still in the shape and with the indentions of the can and tasting faintly metallic. For dessert we had pumpkin pie topped with Cool Whip that no one ate or a chocolate pudding pie that everyone did. And cookies dyed orange and yellow and green, which we’d made at home, cut out in the shapes of turkeys and decorated with our names written in shaky white frosting, drifting off the side.
The kids’ table was twice the size of the adults’ table. Lots of whining and crying, maybe some vomiting. Kernels of corn were scattered everywhere, spilled gravy soaking into the white paper tablecloth decorated with turkeys. Before we ate, we’d go around the table, bashfully mentioning something we were thankful for, to much teasing and poking from my brothers and boy cousins. What a rite of passage it was to be moved up to the grownups’ table.
After everyone left, it was cleanup time. Soaking the massive roasting pan that only came out at Thanksgiving, soapy water swirled with grease, scraping off the mashed potatoes that had glued themselves onto the serving dish, hand washing the good dishes that were coated with congealed gravy. And always, that feeling of over-fullness, that you couldn’t eat another thing until the following Thursday.
Though I don’t spend holidays with my extended family and haven’t for years, I still remember the look on my grandmother’s face — the matriarch of our brood — at the end of those Thanksgiving plays, sitting in a wing-back chair with her children and their children clustered around her. She’s gone now, as are my sister, aunt, uncle and a cousin, making me more aware of gathering people close.
Thanksgiving, after all, isn’t about the food or the chaos or the cleanup. It’s a celebration of family. These days, I’m surrounded by my own small family and it’s more than enough.
