Save The Day, Savor Your Family

Thanksgiving 2012.

When I was growing up, I imagine my family celebrated Thanksgiving like most families throughout the U.S.

The Big Day started with Mom getting up early and getting the turkey on. And as soon as we could get breakfast in us, my brother and I would settle ourselves down in front of our black and white in-a-maple-wood-console television set (and later than most families a stand-alone color TV), where we'd watch Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, with mom popping in between preparing courses to marvel at the spectacle. It wouldn't be long before I'd be put in charge of at least half of the prep work because, really, and I know this is sacrilege, I didn't care for Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Who knows where my Dad was. Oh, my parents were married and Dad was at home, but there were four things you could count on about my father and his whereabouts when he wasn't at his paid job. He was either in bed resting (his health had not been good since I was four), puttering around the house cleaning or doing ironing, working in the yard, or washing and waxing his car. My father washed and waxed his car weekly. I kid you not. He also had the best shined shoes of anyone I'd ever met.

For people who do not remember real leather uppers and leather soles on shoes, shoes were kept shined because it protected the leather and helped the shoes last. (We wanted shoes to last because, well, people wanted most things to last back then because there was this thing called savings, and most people wanted that almost as much as a new living room suite or perhaps more.) The leather uppers lasted so long that you'd naturally get the leather soles replaced.

Now, given the collections of shoes that many people have and think they need today, you might be hard pressed to believe that people, but particularly children, typically owned two pairs of shoes: the shoes they wore during the week to school and their Sunday's finest, which was worn to church if you were a church goer and/or when you were your best dressed. When the weekday shoes wore out, the Sunday shoes rotated into the week, and you got a new pair of Sunday shoes. That is, if you didn't outgrow them first. And hard as that might be to imagine, kids often wore out shoes before they could outgrow them because they were busy running around in them instead of sitting in front of a TV or computer. Shoes, not fingers or thumbs, really got a work out.

Later, if your family had money (meaning you'd manage to graduate from the working poor to working class or lower middle class), tennis shoes were introduced into your children's nascent collection (nascent because it takes at least three to make a collection). Particularly if you were a boy because, after sandals fell out of favor for boys, Chuck Taylors were to be lived in after school and during the summer. Needless to say, flip flops were de rigueur for girls once they were introduced into the culture. And aside from winter boots, at some point all girls just had to own a completely shameless and unnecessary pair of white Go Go boots (even if it broke her parents bank) and later, platform shoes. Those shoe marketers were beginning to work overtime to capture the ever growing discretionary spending of even working class families. (Yes, as hard as it is to believe today, many working class families had some discretionary money.)

But I digress, the point I'm making is this: leather soled shoes are much better for dancing.

Um, no, it was Thanksgiving I was talking about and how my family celebrated it like most other American families.

Save for the fact that we had no relatives living within a reasonable drive. We lived on the East Coast and my Dad's family lived in Kansas. My mother's family lived in Northern Ireland where Thanksgiving was not celebrated. So there were no fights with relatives at the dinner table over wine or the harder stuff. Actually, there were no alcoholic drinks save for a cordial glass of Creme de Menthe after dinner. Something my parents indulged me in along with them. My brother Michael had no interest in the artificially green Creme de Menthe, which pretty much summed up his life-long attitude about alcohol.

No judgment on others; Michael just never got it even though my father had spent a happy portion of his life being a bartender and our home was well stocked with specialty glassware and alcohol for the unexpected and thirsty guest. And odd as it might seem, as pre teens and teens, it never occurred to either my brother or me to raid the liquor cabinet. Alcohol was not consumed in any great amount in our family. Save for the fact that Mom got pleasantly tipsy at Christmas and during her duck pin bowling banquet once a year and every evening for two to three weeks every few years when her sisters came to visit from Northern Ireland. But other than that, tea totaling was not promoted and alcohol abuse was not modeled in our family.

Not being raised with Thanksgiving didn't stop my mother from going all out: We had turkey, but were we ever so glad when they came out with legless turkeys because none of us liked dark meat (yes, another sacrilege), mashed potatoes, green beans, peas with pearl onions, canned cranberry--the kind that comes out in the shape of the can. It would be years before I tasted the sauce kind from the can and even more years before I started making it from the berries myself. And to top off the meal, when we could finally afford it, two store bought pies. Usually, pumpkin for my Dad and me, but only incidentally for me, and an apple pie for Michael and Mom. Later, when my Dad died, my mother would purchase an apple pie only. She never noticed that I hate apple pie... oh my goodness, yet another sacrilege.

I let that pie oversight go without remark for 28 years. But mostly because our family celebrated Thanksgiving with my ex-Y's family for years and years, and their tradition involved home made pumpkin or sweet potato (my absolute favorite pie) and lemon meringue, with my mother carting along her store bought apple as her contribution to a successful holiday meal whenever we celebrated it at my mother-in-law's home. It was when we started celebrating Thanksgiving with my in-laws that we were introduced to that favorite Thanksgiving side dish: sweet potatoes with marshmallow topping. However, we simply tolerated that concoction.

The real hit with my family was my mother-in-law's most marvelous broccoli dish (broccoli baked in mushroom soup with cheddar cheese and onion crisps on top). Mom and Michael, who shared Aquarius as a star sign--not that it matters to this story--, could shamelessly inhale half of the dish in a gathering of ten, and so Frances, my ex mother-in-law, would make extra. Sometimes I wonder if she ever tired of making or eating that side dish because after first introducing it to our family Aquarians, she had to make it every Thanksgiving and every Christmas for close to twenty years. I know I never tired of Frances's ambrosia. (Yes, TWO marshmallow inspired side dishes at the same meal!)

And like most families, we spent after dinner playing board games. Well, after my mother took her obligatory after holiday meal nap on the couch. We weren't sports fans in my home ("How many sacrileges can one story contain?"), but we got our fill of that at my husband's family's home and our home and his aunt and uncle's home once we all started sharing that holiday together. As my Mom took her after dinner nap, my MIL and her sister-in-law and I would go for a long, long walk to walk off all that food. Then, after the football games were over (in the days before the games stretched long into the night), we'd play board games as a family. Good times.

All that changed when I left my ex-Y. Suddenly, holidays were comprised of my brother, mother, and me and often one of my two ex-Xs. For the most part, we--what was left of my nuclear family from my childhood (Mom, Michael, and me)--missed the large family gatherings. Later, when my ex-X, the love of my life, left me when I was at my sickest (for the newly initiated I have ME/CFS and am debilitatingly ill, disabled), it was just my mother, now ill herself, and me. Thanksgiving, always my favorite holiday, and Christmas hers. We found ways to make the holidays special for us despite the challenges of cooking for two people who could barely stand long enough to make a salad.

When I started writing this, my intent was to write about the fact that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Mostly because it did not involve the commercialization of Christmas and was, ostensibly, a celebration to give thanks. For this reason, I urge everyone to stay at home, keep your holiday tradition, don't shop on Thanksgiving day, resist the commercialization of a day where the only consumerism has to do with how much food you can consume at one sitting. Save the Day, savor your family.

Also, I wanted to get around to saying that the family of my childhood and my various adopted families never celebrated Thanksgiving quite as I would have liked, save for the walk after dinner and the raucous board games and sweet potato pie. There was one tradition missing as far as I was concerned--one that I think I could have talked my Dad into participating in had I thought of this as a child.

I would have liked, after grace, to have gone around the table and had each of us talk about what we were thankful for. My attempts at getting this tradition off the ground met with dismal failure. I admit it: Despite years of believing myself to have not a single sentimental bone in my body, I am quite sentimental. And I think it a good thing to take risks, to share our inner most tender thoughts, particularly with those we love.

I'm well aware that I used the word save more than was stylistically necessary when writing this essay. It was intentional. My favorite all time line out of a movie was said twice in "Men Don't Leave" by a little boy playing Jessica Lange's youngest son. Each of the two times he said this particular line, the boy was referring to a particular family time remembered, a time which epitomized the sense of being held in the bosom of his family. The line? "And then I was saved."

Today is my first Thanksgiving alone. I mean really alone. Not just that my partner is out of town with family and I'm stuck in bed with a cold sort of alone. My mother died in July; the day before the anniversary of my brother's death seven years earlier. My father has been gone 30 years now this year.

And today, I get to spend the holiday in a way I always hoped my family would: I'm savoring my family and times past (because that's what I have right now). I'm thankful for having had Marion (my Dad), Margaret (my Mom), and Michael (my brother) in my life. I'm thankful for Frances and her husband Britt, who's been gone 12 years, and for Steve, my ex-Ys brother who's been gone for 26 years, and for Sharlet and Larry (Frances's brother and sister-in-law), and Grandma (Frances's mother), who's been gone 18 years, and the holidays spent with Britt's family. And I'm even thankful for my ex-Y--he was swell during the holidays--, and my ex-Xs who were less swell during the holidays but more swell throughout the year. Without my ex-Y, I wouldn't have all those happy memories with his family. With our blended family.

Enjoy your family. Life is short. Considering drinking less than you want or not at all if drinking leads to family feuding. Be gracious, don't go looking for fights. Food over cooking or getting cold is less important than the time spent together. Savor your family traditions and make new ones. Memories are made from days like today. Ones you can cherish for a life time if you cherish your time together.

Blessings this Thanksgiving Day.