Home For Holidays

I have a soft spot for Thanksgiving.

To be fair, I have a soft spot for a lot of holidays, which is why faithful readers may recognize that pretty much every year, I have not only a Thanksgiving-related post in November, but a Christmas one in December, a Halloween one in October, and commemorate others on a more sporadic basis.

Out of a not altogether happy childhood, I have positive memories of Thanksgiving as a day spent with my beloved sister and grandmother while my mother and father prepared dinner, to be followed by the only non-Chinese dinners we ate family style with most of the traditional fixings. Add in a couple days off from school, the onset of Christmas season, WWF Survivor Series, and what more could you ask for?

I always associated this holiday with my childhood home, even after the holiday lost some of its luster—after my grandmother wasn’t well enough to travel over to the house and climb the stairs necessary to get to our kitchen anymore; after my sister stopped coming home for it after her first year of college; after my parents split up; after the recognition of the holiday--at least as far as my biological family went--narrowed to just my father and I eating turkey, stuffing, and yams. But as much as the familial elements of Turkey Day dwindled, I liked coming home from college to see old friends. There came a time when I started splitting the holiday as many as three ways, having dinner with my girlfriend’s family, then my best friend’s, then winding up back at my old man’s kitchen table.

But there came a shift. A bad night-before-Thanksgiving out with old friends, which included my car breaking down, to cap a lousy fall, and after that a so-so Thanksgiving questioning if or how soon my car would get me back out of town. Rather than returning to what I still thought of as home the next year, I sought out something different. I took a longer drive and spent the holiday at my sister’s house with her in-laws. And there was a shift. I liked Thanksgiving again.

I liked Thanksgiving again enough to spend the holiday at my sister’s house for five years, right up until I moved across the country for grad school and it became wildly impractical to make such a long trip for just a couple days, and especially so when there was just one week of the semester left after that. So it was that Heather and I made our first Thanksgiving dinner of our own (or, to assess the situation more fairly, Heather made our first Thanksgiving dinner; I reached what cooking implements she needed from high-up shelves, and I ate).

We had invitations, out in Oregon, to spend the holiday with friends from and connected to my graduate program. There was an awkward line between friends and the kind of friends I’d spend a holiday with--totally self-imposed and arbitrary. Heather and I watching Muppet movies and eating too much--for as small and understated as our celebration might be--was my best approximation of a sense of home.

Heather and me. That would become the new norm.

For though we’d spend a Thanksgiving with her folks and a Christmas with mine, more and more it became the two of us.

And then Riley.

Thanksgiving 2017, we stayed home at the little house we rented in Georgia, less to be insular than for Riley’s due date creeping up, less than three weeks away. We wanted to be near our hospital of choice, go-bag ready in the trunk even as we failed in our attempt to prepare “a small meal” and still had food enough for the two of us to eat too much for at least three days.

But by the time Christmas rolled around, Riley was two weeks old, the both of us about as tired as we’d ever been, the thought of traveling out of state to be with family unfathomable.

And it occurred to me, this was home.

For though I wasn’t back in the green raised ranch where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, and not in the white-walled room with the yellow carpeting overlooking the backyard, where I’d woken up my first twenty-five Thanksgivings, and not with my father or mother or sister or friends I’d known since I was a teenager, I was with my wife. And I was with my son. And they, more than any particular house, neighborhood, city, or state define home for me: where I love easiest and am loved. Where I am happy. Where I want to be.

And so, to you readers, I wish you a home on your own terms and by your own definition. I wish you a holiday full of the foods you want to eat, the people you want to see, or heck, whatever you want for a holiday to mean to you.

(With full acknowledgment that this post goes live a week and a half in advance of it) Happy Thanksgiving.