Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.
Maybe I’m getting old, maybe I’m just feeling sappy and nostalgic, or maybe I just have some free time on my hands because I don’t have to cook the dinner this year, but I’ve been thinking a lot about Thanksgivings past.
I have so many memories—good and bad—tied up in this holiday. Here are just a few:
- Each year in elementary school, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we had a half-day, but we only had class until around 10:00. Then they brought us down to the cafeteria and showed us a movie—something appropriate for kids our age (and our time, the late 1970s/early 1980s), like Escape from Witch Mountain or That Darn Cat (the original). When the movie was over, they served us Burger King, brought in from the local fast-food joint, before sending us home for the holiday weekend. To this day, I can’t pass a Burger King without thinking fondly of those Thanksgiving Eve burgers.
- In middle school, my favorite teacher made us write an essay describing our family’s Thanksgiving traditions. In composing mine, I unwittingly pissed off my mother by mentioning that she spent the predawn hours of the holiday not only prepping the turkey feast but buffing away any speck of dust from the furniture, in anticipation of the guests we invited each year (I’m not sure how that’s an insult, but she certainly took it as one!).
- In high school, my on-again/off-again boyfriend dumped me after one of our standard (and spectacular) blowup fights right after the Thanksgiving Day football game. I had to walk home, crying and alone, in the cold holiday rain. Do I need to mention that we kissed and made up before nightfall, only to break up yet again the following weekend? Ah, young love.
- In college, when I was finally (sort of) seen as a grownup, I was allowed not only to have wine with the official Thanksgiving dinner, but I also sat up with my mom and her best friend, our neighbor Joanie, the night before the holiday, talking and laughing and playing drinking games. Even now, all these years later, I often feel a hankering to play a round of Three-Man on the night before Thanksgiving …
- And then there was the year my grandmother died on the day before Thanksgiving, and we all said it was because she just didn’t want to have to decide whose house to go to for dinner that year. Sometimes death really DOES seem easier than dealing with family.
So many memories—and you get to add a new one to the collection every year. I wonder if I’ll be looking back wistfully on tomorrow’s events in another couple of decades.
I hope so.
