Re-Attempting A Traditional Thanksgiving

Step 1: Get out of bed.

Thanksgiving is upon us.

It’s one of those holidays I’ve always been forced to celebrate. Softly and creatively as a little girl way back when Thanksgiving meant more arts and craft time, hand turkeys, school plays, and the very rewarding extra day off from school.

As an underpaid corporate media slave, Thanksgiving was the unofficial kickoff for the most miserable time of the year: the desperate quest to find money, close deals and meet goals. The manic sales bros. Me being forced to write decks and strategy for cokedream campaigns that we’d never win. Offering deliverables that didn’t exist. Making up deadlines that didn’t matter. The usual scramble that happens in an industry that is dependent on an industry more sensible than itself, one that rightfully starts clocking out for the year sometime around mid-October. But not media, not ad sales marketing, and not the exhausted media buyers we were groveling to.

Taking time off for Thanksgiving meant that you at least had enough corporate privilege to get your days approved, had the days to spare, and, of course, that you could actually afford to travel.

Summer Fridays once existed universally as every Friday between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Then, they were cut to just every other Friday. Then just one Friday a month, before being trimmed to a sort of carrot dangling just out of reach. You did technically have access to two extra vacation days, and they did have to be used during the summer (and, of course, couldn’t roll over), but they had to be requested well in advance and couldn’t be approved until they were puzzle-pieced against the rest of the active requests, because god forbid more than two employees on the same team take the same absolutely dead Friday before July 4th’s Monday off.

I used to work for so many miserable people. One micro-managing manager who I remember responding to non-urgent, inconsequential emails while literally on leave for a very tragic bereavement. Another who… actually let me stop. That one, a department head, my boss. The first week I started, she was haunching over her desk crying at 9:01 AM while her boss, a C-level psycho the size of a cricket, called her slow and fat. She took it. I knew immediately I would never be getting a raise, and there would never be any advocacy for my work or contributions. And there wasn’t.

So, I took most of my sick days and vacation days as “mental health days.” Days to just fucking have a morning off to hike, or go to the beach. To be away from those people, those emails, and those rooms. By the time the end of the year came around, there were no extra days left to spare on Thanksgiving leisure.

After I finally saw the light and moved onto companies that properly observed Thanksgiving as a full-week break (and paid salaries accordingly), adult me could finally explore the holiday beyond just a single day off to sleep in or chug martinis at a Friendsgiving.

Still, having dinner at home alone was a lot more sanity-protecting than flying off to family. I like to cook, yes, but younger me learned that “doing it myself” was the only way I’d get the Thanksgiving experience I saw on HGTV or The Food Network. The perfectly demonstrated steps for the perfect holiday meal, decor, or, the perfect home life, guided by perfect hosts. I cooked, and crafted, and holiday decorated, and curb appealed, and dissociated my way out of the world created by my parent’s traumatic divorce.

If we’re talking family, trauma, and Thanksgiving in that order, the real stuff started two generations before me. I wrote last year about the Thanksgiving Day death of my great grandmother over fifty years ago:

Anyway, by the time Thanksgiving Free Will showed up and I no longer had to view the holiday through the lens of my work schedule, I’d already been out in the wild for too long. The formality, tradition, and turkey no longer seemed like the best use of time. I didn’t crave it, and I didn’t want to start my own family to create a perfect new world for it.

I opted for robes and room service in Vegas. Tried a second attempt at liking Kauai. Ate a pretty nasty Thanksgiving dinner in Paris mid-pandemic. Had a beautifully braindead week staying at home last year after plans for a spontaneous trip went nowhere.

Today, I’m in a house on a perch out in the high desert. Outside it’s clear, cold and gusty. Honey doesn’t feel like getting out of bed and honestly neither do I. We’re warm, my #blankie is furry side down. Jimmy Fallon’s insufferable pumpkin head just popped up on the Thanksgiving Parade Pre-Game (pre-game? pre-show?), and surprisingly — shockingly— I’m happy sitting through the segment. Didn’t even reach for the remote control to skip him off my screen.

I have a turkey (conveniently pre-brined by Trader Joe), a Christmas playlist, and a fridge full of groceries I’m still not fully sure I feel like cooking. The idea of this escape and cooking a delicious grand traditional Thanksgiving dinner for two (me and Honeybee) sounded great on paper. But, I don’t actually feel like doing it anymore. Today could easily be a grilled-cheese-for-dinner day, like yesterday was. Because Thanksgiving is just a day. And, if we’re getting into it, it’s not really supposed to be a happy one anyway. (Truly the best example of American logic — “these nice people were kind to us and fed us, so we fucking destroyed them.”) Anyway, I’m going to sit up right, get out of bed, have an iced coffee and a slice of this Patti Pie, and cook some food.

*mimosas > proofreading