Thanksgiving is one of the national holidays when there are norms about what is expected. These may differ in regions of the country and somewhat among families, but still the expectations of food and family gatherings are held in common. However, I cannot recall ever really welcoming this holiday for myself.
I have various stories about why this might be the case. What I observe, as I have become more self-reflective with age is that I want this holiday to be celebrated differently. Over the years, I have kept trying to come up with alternatives to the feasting and large family gatherings. “What is the most important thing about Thanksgiving? Let’s just do or have that.” “What about inviting strangers for Thanksgiving this year?” This year, I am avoiding both by declaring this a day for private and solitary contemplation.
I am experiencing grief as this anniversary of the birthdays of three people I loved who have died. I am letting myself feel that sadness. I also have a story of Thanksgiving as a sad day in my childhood with only my nuclear family present as we lived a thousand miles from extended family. The best of the recollected celebrations were the ones when my parents invited others to join us, student couples for example. But that didn’t happen every year. With just the 5 of us, it didn’t seem very festive. We didn’t decorate or dress up so it was just another meal on a day when friends would not be available to play.
As an obese woman, a holiday that supports gluttony is also not so positive. It makes me even more self-conscious if I enjoy foods I might often deny myself. So over the years I have tried to cut back on the offerings, make them less fat, sugar and carb filled, and yet satisfy the favorite flavors. And what a lot of work it is, on a prescribed day when I might not be in the mood for cooking.
So this year, I am staying home. Eating exactly what I would like to eat and when I want to eat it. I’m not filling the house with leftovers, although I do agree with many that the leftovers are more enjoyable than the hot meal on the table. Maybe because they come together into a small meal or sandwich with so much less work. I might even enjoy making the traditional meal sometime, but just not at the time the calendar tells me I must.
I am thinking about stories, the one we tell and retell about our lives. The stories that seem to justify feeling a certain way, or acting in the ways we do. I remind myself that they are just stories. I shared my thoughts about one of these with my brother as we talked after the wedding of his son recently. The family story has always been that this brother was a miserable baby who cried all the time. But I told him that as I have put together events in the family it seems much more likely that he was born as our mother was still in the midst of grief over the loss of her mother less than a year before. In fact, she told us that her mother had just died in the weeks before he was born and she moved away from the family home to New York City. In fact her mother had died 11 months prior, but she brought her son home from the hospital to the house where she grew up and her mother was not there to nurse her. Three weeks later, the family moved to a tiny apartment in NYC and she was alone most of the time with a newborn and me, 4 years old. Years later, she confided that she had been so depressed she contemplated jumping out of window in our high rise building. She said she didn’t because of the two children dependent on us. This was a combination of high stress situations that likely led to my brother reacting to the stress rather than causing it. A small change, but a meaningful one.
What other stories do I carry that are also open to reinterpretation? Probably all of them. The grad. student who taught the seminar in German Lit. when I was at the University in Freiburg may have just been an unfeeling clod when he told me about my term paper: “Your German is very good. It is a shame you had no ideas.” Those words haunted me for years. “I am someone who has no ideas”. The subject of the paper was a story by Adelbert Stifter, a 19th century Austrian writer. I wish I still had that paper and could read it now. Of course I might agree with the assessment, but it would not be likely to sting the way it did then. ( I just looked up this writer and learned some things about him i wish I had known at the time. I realize I did not have any of the historical background when i was reading him.)
So today, I am contemplating the power of stories in my life and for others. We can rewrite the stories to reflect what we now know or what we can imagine. They needn’t be carved in stone in the family history.
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