Interesting times

When I was a child, Thanksgiving was always a magical family affair. We'd pile into the Volvo and head for San Francisco, where one of my Dad's cousins put on this huge, fabulous feast for every member of the clan on the West Coast that could make it. I have relatives I've only ever seen there, and haven't seen since. Eventually the hosts grew old, and couldn't host the party anymore, and the magic slid into oblivion.

Around the same time, my parents divorced. Then Thanksgiving and Christmas became politicized affairs. Which parent would my brother and I stay with for which holiday? How many days would we stay there? I think the agreement was actually hammered out in the divorce proceedings. Broken families suck, and the traditional holidays are one such burden placed on the children. Talk about magic sliding into oblivion! Not that spending time with either parent was a bad thing, but it just felt... forced.

I'm about four years older than my brother, so when I hit 18 the rules suddenly no longer applied to me. It was more convenient, however, to stick with the schedule my brother was still bound too. Plus it was practically wired into my nervous system by that point: Thanksgiving with Dad, Christmas with Mom, same thing every year.

Four years after that, however, my brother also turned 18 and departed for college. The rules no longer applied to him either. Suddenly I had options!

Those who know me well know that I hate, despise, loath, and abhor Christmas. I'm a terrible Scrooge. My reasons are twofold. First, I am not a Christian, and I hate hate hate that a Christian holiday has been so forced onto the common psyche that it's unavoidable starting, oh, around mid-September and increasingly haunts us until about the second week of January. I hate the music, I hate the ornaments, and I hate the ritual slaying of trees (I'm not totally insane, however -- I like presents). Second, the crass commercialism of the holiday bothers me to no end. I visibly cringe the first time I hear a holiday jingle in some mall when it's still late summer, the endless parade of ads bores into my brain, its all about money money money and the pressure to buy buy buy for your family and friends. If you get a seasonal gift from me, it means I really like you as a person, because it takes a Herculean effort to make me purchase something for someone I know.

Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is a holiday I can really get into. Thanksgiving (although based on a celebration of the invasion of Western culture into the New World, a fact I blissfully try to ignore) is mostly about family, friendship, and togetherness for no other reason than to be together and eat a lot of good food. It has most of the earmarks of what I hate about Christmas, but in much more moderation -- toned down to an amount I can palate.

After escaping the cycle of divorce-family-holiday-schedule, I discovered one year, with my new-found options, that I could spend Thanksgiving with whomever I wanted. I suspect the seed was actually planted by snakefeathers and other Canadian ex-pats who started a tradition of celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving (which is in October) with their chosen family and friends. The first time I spent American Thanksgiving someplace other than with my family -- I think it was at draphsor and aikikelly's place -- it was a real eye opener. I could sit at a table of people whom I cared about, who I wasn't related to, and be an adult. These were my peers. These were people I could sit with and drink wine, eat turkey, and talk about topics that were relevent to my generation. In short, I loved it. I've managed to spend Thanksgiving somewhere different every year since.

This year was no different, I have rheafire and furycom to thank for the tremendous spread they prepared. I believe Rachel's got some photos of the meal she'll be publishing soon, and I'll crosslink them here. Well worth it! (Oh, and extra thanks to miss_emelia for letting me know that they were taking in Thanksgiving orphans.)

Everything after this year's Thanksgiving, however, has been a little weird this weekend. I had, like most Americans, all four days off. There are a number of people I really need to catch up with, and as best I can tell none of them have been around/available for the weekend, since they're all off doing the usual Thanksgiving things. So I've sat. And read my book. And napped. And since I couldn't help myself, I worked for a few hours on Friday. Ever since the meal I've been in this bizarre stasis, with no real plans to do much of anything, and no real impetus to make the connections I want or need to make.

The last time I felt like this was the long, dark time of my unemployment. Back then, I went months on end just reading, watching TV, playing videogames, occasionally going out with folks, and otherwise just slowly coasting through life waiting for a change. Now that period of my life is passed, and I find myself out of practice. I don't know how to kill three days with little to do anymore. It feels like the world slowed down to bullet time for 72 hours only there's nothing going on. Fortunately, the foley's about to speed back up and my life can return to realtime: capricious_k will be back, and I can dive back into work tomorrow.