Thankful
Thanksgiving is my favorite US holiday. Now, like many holidays, it has a pretty dubious origin—the colonization of this country certainly wasn’t all turkey and gravy and friendship, and Thanksgiving didn’t even become a thing until Abraham Lincoln pitched it as a bit of a PR ploy. But there’s something special and different about a day whose core purpose is simply to be thankful: for family and friends, and for being (in the words of Ricky Gervais) so “fucking lucky” to even have been born.
I certainly feel that way this year. I wouldn’t say I took Thanksgiving for granted in the past, but it did at times become another of those holidays where the effort surrounding it began to dim its light. Think about logistics. Grab ingredients. Pack the car. Make sure the boys have everything they need. Drive six or (more recently) nine or ten hours to their grandparents’ house. Unpack everything again. Field all the usual questions about life, with an undercurrent of “wouldn’t this be better if all the kids were here?” Hot stoves on the Thursday morning; frantic, frantic. Try to enjoy a meal that’s unreasonably large while cutting food for the boys, enduring their picking around the turkey they’ve never really taken to, grabbing an apple sauce or Goldfish or whatever it is they actually will eat, spending half an hour helping to clean everything up, then collapsing in a chair for three or four seconds before it’s time to get on the carpet with the boys and play with cars or blocks or whatever while trying to keep an eye on football on the TV before the tryptophan knocks you out. Rinse. Repeat annually.
But … isn’t that amazing?
It’s all wonderful, when you think about how lucky any of us are to celebrate it. I may roll my eyes at the abomination that is American cuisine (I mean, they literally use marshmallows in a sweet potato dish. Presumably, the pilgrims had a stash of Jet-Puffed goodness). And we all know the tropes about awkward Thanksgiving conversations with crazy uncles or never-happy relatives, which are tropes because it’s absolutely true. But, again, would you have it any other way?
So, I’m going to enjoy Thanksgiving this year with my boys and their mum. It’s been … a year. But in the context of all that’s going on in the world and being endured by others, I have a lot to be very, very thankful for. My boys. My family. My friends. The people who have always there for me, and the people who have lately become indispensable. And while life is always to be lived in the present—the past is gone, the future never works out how you plan—I have much to look forward to. Gobble gobble!