Guest Blog Entry!

My Thanksgiving story.

Something a little more than a decade ago, for a couple years, I would ask people I worked with about their holiday plans each November and December. I didn’t keep absolute numbers on this whim of mine; I just wanted to get a general sense of what everyone did for the various holidays.

About 80% of the responses went like this: “Oh, I have to go to my wife’s family’s for Thanksgiving. I have a pile of work to get through, and her father is a complete prick. But what can you do? If I don’t want to slit my wrists, I have to fly halfway across the country.”

About 10% went like this: “Yeah, I’m going to see my sister and her husband and their three kids. Hell, it’s a free meal. The airport’s going to be a frickin’ nightmare, but I haven’t see them in a few years, so it’ll be good to catch up.”

And the remaining 10%? Their stories went like this one, told to me by a woman I worked with whose face, just like in the cliche, “lit up” when she told it: “My grandmother’s 93 years old, and we’re pretty sure she isn’t going to make it to 94, so we’re calling the whole family together. We all love her, and we want to have one last visit together.”

I think about that a lot, especially around the holidays, especially now. People running around like something horrific is chasing them, stabbing at keyboards while they walk, doing work on the subway as they head INTO work, talking to people at the office via the Borg implant in their heads while standing in line for something at Starbucks. And after all that hard work, all that take-home crap and stand-in-line stress, what do you get? A couple slices of turkey and some stuffing that you can’t even enjoy because you’ve become so conditioned to constantly be thinking about work that you don’t even recall having eaten the damned yams that were on your plate.

Make Thanksgiving the line in the sand. Make a real goddamn turkey (or tofurkey). Make some side dishes. Do you realize how simple it is to make cranberry sauce? Not that Jell-O/toothpaste cylinder that plops out of the can with a horribly Chthluian sound? Be adventurous, use butter. Live right on the frickin’ edge, people: make the mashed potatoes from potatoes, not from flakes in a pouch. Take back one day of enjoyment from the whole 24/7/365 cycle of constantly being “on” and scared witless of what’s coming around the corner to ruin your life a little more.

Have seconds on stuffing. Enjoy yourself. One day out of the year, enjoy yourself and forget about whatever horrible combination of disasters is breathing down your neck. All the grief will still be there come Friday morning.