A few days ago over at a Gai Shan Life, Revanche described spending Thanksgiving with a friend, having opted a trip to visit her perennially stress-inducing relatives. Though she was obviously relieved to have freed herself from another angst-filled holiday, you can almost touch the guilt vibes coming off that post.
Is there one among us who does not feel this?
The purpose of family is to spoil holidays for adult children, siblings, and cousins. It’s part of the cosmic order.
I find Christmas especially depressing, because my mother loved it so and made a very big deal of it. She learned her flair for Christmas celebration from her grandmother, who turned Christmas into high performance art. It was the holiday for us. I miss my mother a lot, and I miss her and her family the most during Christmas.
My stepmother, who came on the scene shortly after my mother died, practiced her own art of making Christmas miserable. Like many who loudly pretend to be followers of Christ, she was just downright mean. It took a long time before I realized she was doing it on purpose: exploiting holidays to stage a hurtful remark or a nasty stunt. I finally figured it out when she tried to do a number on me at Easter. Unlike her tribe, my family, not being worshipers of the man from Galilee, didn’t celebrate Easter. So when she threw a zinger at me that spring it had no effect…except to make it clear that she thought I would be missing my family and that she was taking the opportunity to reduce me to tears again. Later her daughter revealed that I wasn’t the only target of her machinations—that she’d been doing it for years to everyone around her.
When we were young, my husband and I used to get together with our best friends the weekend after Thanksgiving and throw a magnificent feast, which we called TGTGIO: Thank God Thanksgiving Is Over! Turkey was absolutely out of bounds, and so the focus of dinner would be roasts like leg of lamb, duck, prime rib… My friend Barbarella could REALLY cook, and so could I.
It went a long way toward making us feel better.
Later, when I could no longer stomach another Midwestern meal of flat white stuff (the new relatives favored overcooked steamed Butterball turkey, mashed potatoes with the consistency of library paste, and cauliflower, accompanied by “salad” of canned fruit in lime Jell-O), we would bundle the kid and ourselves in the car and drive 12 hours (one-way) to Grand Junction, Colorado, there to spend Thanksgiving with my husband’s mother. It was a desperation move. Just imagine: driving 24 hours, often through blizzards and over long stretches of black ice, to get out of spending three or four hours with that bunch!
I wasn’t a lot fonder of my mother-in-law. She was so powerfully opinionated that she believed her every thought, no matter how cockamamie or faddish, was dead right, and if you didn’t agree with her in every detail you must be a blithering fool. However, she was at least neither deliberately mean nor stone stupid. Since she admired intellect no end, I could safely bury myself in a book all the time we were there, avoiding most confrontations.
Well, all those people are gone now or nearly so, and though I will confess to an occasional moment of loneliness at the holidays, I certainly don’t miss those who went out of their way to create unhappiness. M’hijito’s circle has developed a holiday tradition of putting on a big party for all their young friends, and the older generation is invited to that. It’s a great deal more fun than any of the true “family” holidays many of us experience.
They say Generation X substitutes friends for family. Maybe that’s as it should be.
Images:
Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia I. Public domain.
John Leech, Scrooge and Bob Cratchit. Illustration for Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Public Domain.
Angst indeed. SDXB is sort of family, isn’t he?
BTW, did the sink-fix we sent yesterday work?
Funny, I have mixed feelings about this. I’m quite familiar with toxic family.
However, it makes me feel bad to hear complaints about a bland, white Thanksgiving dinner. I have thrown a million holiday dinners both for the older generation and now I’m the older generation so I throw it for the younger.
I have never been an imaginative cook and I can barely turn out the traditional stuff. But it’s done with alot of love. I work extremly hard cleaning the house and cooking and would hate to think people were choosing to criticize the blandness of the food.
I think the food is the least of the day.
@ E. Murphy: Sorry! Didn’t mean to load on an added dose of guilt or misplaced inadequacy!
We’ll have to post some EASY DELICIOUS traditional recipes between now and the big day.
It certainly was true that food was the least of the day at my stepsister’s place. She would invite unattached waifs from Ohio (she presided over an expat community of Ohioans, who found themselves utterly out of water in the alien world that is the Southwest), and we would have to be polite to guests whose thinking was strange and politics sometimes even stranger.
One Thanksgiving we were treated to two young women who had recently graduated from an Ohio university’s school of education. That fall they’d taken jobs on the Navajo reservation, openings they’d found on a bulletin board in their university department.
Have you ever noticed that white people will say the darnedest things when they think they’re in a company that consists solely of other white people?
They confessed to not having known, when they applied for the jobs, what a “Navajo” was or where the Navajo reservation was. Then they went into a long rant about how much they disliked the Navajo, how they couldn’t stand the kids, how they hated Window Rock, and on and on and tediously on. These two morons had been on the Rez for four months and still knew nothing about the people and cared even less for them. They had never left Window Rock, never explored the reservation, never made an effort to make friends with the people.
The Navajo reservation has areas of spectacular beauty. The Navajo themselves, despite generations of deprivation and the lasting effects of defeat at the hands of European invaders, are themselves spectacularly beautiful people. They are gracious and kind, gifted with a subtle and telling sense of humor, and capable of great hospitality.
As we sat there listening to the two women natter on, the step-relatives, a xenophobic group who lived in fear of the Brown Tide (no joke! it was one of my stepmother’s favorite hobbyhorses), nodded and chimed in their agreement. Dare to demur, and you would be crushed.
LOL! I think it was THAT day that gave the prospect of traveling 24 hours back and forth across Four Corners its appeal.
I wonder how many people remember library paste!
@ Jennifer: I’ve always thought of library paste as essentially the same thing as mashed potatoes: white starchy stuff. The nice thing about mashed potatoes, though, is that they melt butter quite nicely.
Can you remember making paste, when you were a little kid, out of flour and water? {heh heh heh} I’ll bet my mother loved cleaning that up.