I have always loved Thanksgiving, perhaps even more than I love Christmas, because it is less commercial, because it is more genuine. It is a holiday created to give thanks, something I firmly believe in - it is a time when families cross our country to reunite, to break bread, to share their trials and triumphs of the year.
And perhaps I always loved it so much because I have always been such a loved, spoiled individual. Every year, Thanksgiving as a child meant being surrounded by people whom I loved and who I knew loved me. It was about my mother dressing me up in pretty clothes I loved and putting my hair back in huge barrettes and my father making me change out of my tights and into jeans before I ran out to play with all my male cousins.
It is strange to me that these are the things about Thanksgiving that I miss - I pretend that if I were in America this would be the reality of the Holiday. But I know that's not the case. That I am not seven years old anymore, not a little girl, that I would not be romping around in the backyard with my cousins, that my father would not demand I change clothes to do so, that fewer family members would likely make it this year, because as the years have passed our families have evolved. Priorities change. Nuclear families begin to form and grow and disperse. Grandparents grow older and traditions have to change accordingly.
And I cannot help but be saddened by the passage of time, even as I know I am young and it will only get worse as I grow older.
The thing that makes me saddest yet though is that families seem to be under attack in America, and no where is that made more obvious than in how our country treats Thanksgiving.
Take this article in the Times: Food, Kin and Tension. Two cousins have made Thanksgiving Insult BINGO cards, with negativesayings like "That outfit is interesting," that they fill out throughout the meal.
Or this movie, cited as being one of the best to watch on the topic of Thanksgiving: Home for the Holidays in which the characters seem to absolutely despise being together for the majority of the film.
I don't understand how families grow so far apart that Holidays become something that they have to suffer through.
And such attitudes are so completely at odds with the true spirit of Thanksgiving. Perhaps Americans have become too ready to reject blood ties in favor of forming friendships. To say, I don't need my sister's companionship, I can make my own friends and form my own family amongst them.
But as Mary Schmich wrote in her famed 1997 Chicago Tribune article (one of my favorites!):
Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.
And I believe that. Friends are wonderful and amazing and I plan on keeping them as long and as best I can. But they aren't family.
All that to say, this Thanksgiving I am grateful for the following:
- That God is the same everywhere - that He followed me to France.
- For my wonderful, wonderful family. For my amazing parents and my kick-ass brother. For Jonathan. For Nana and Grandma and Grandpa. For Baba. For Donnie. For Rodney and Tim. For Paul. For Bob. For Barb. For their spouses. For all my other crazy cousins and great-aunts and first-cousins-once removed. I feel so grateful.
- For my lovely, beautiful life-long friends.
- For the experience to get to be in France.
- For Sewanee - the amazing University my parents let me go to that I get to return to soon.
- For being 20 years old and having so much life behind but mostly ahead of me.
- For so many other things that I cannot even begin to name all of them, among them woods, music, coffee, the air, gardening, Christmas decorations, hymns, my chickens that I get to meet in a month and how blissfully happy everything makes me on a fairly regular basis.
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