If you’re reading this in the Sunday paper, you realize we’ve all managed somehow to make it through Thanksgiving dinner. With our relatives.
Now, I realize that some of you lucky readers have family members you actually look forward to seeing.
“Gee, I can’t wait for Aunt Susan to get here with little Angela, so we can catch up on all the gossip and play board games all night long,” some of you were saying to yourselves last week. “They are so much fun.”
But if you’re in the other camp, i.e. the always-shut-out camp, you might be thinking, “Oh, great. Aunt Susan. She’ll ask me if I’m married yet, if I’m dating anyone, then she’ll survey me with pity and tell me, ‘That’s OK. Someone will come along.’ While her eyes are actually saying, ‘When pigs fly.’
“Then she’ll look me up and down and point out that turkey can be low-fat but I should skip the gravy and stuffing. She’ll pull a bottle of diet salad dressing out of her purse and tell me she brought it just for me. And then she’ll go to her suitcase and dig out those boring old board games where her daughter always cheats, but none of us are supposed to notice. Then, after dinner, everyone will get up for a walk around the neighborhood, but no one will invite me to come.”
Families are wonderful, aren’t they? I have a friend who dreads such gatherings, because her brother-in-law gets soused and then always manages to find her alone and grope her, and she can never bring herself to tell her sister about it. I’m thinking she should start bringing a taser. Don’t you think?
Naturally, since it’s Thanksgiving, the women will have risen at dawn to cook the entire dinner — a project that makes the Normandy invasion look like a whim. Meanwhile, the men who are present (being enlightened 21st Century types) wander into the kitchen occasionally during the commercial breaks in the football game to ask if they can do anything. And, if they can’t, can they have some more of that tasty onion dip?
Of course I’m being sexist and generalizing, especially since a male friend is planning to cook the turkey for our feast, which makes me a liar and a hypocrite. But I don’t care. That’s what’s nice about becoming as old as dirt. You can say whatever you want. Although I can’t curse in a family newspaper, which is deeply disheartening.
When I host a dinner at my house (stop laughing, it could happen), I usually make a rule: NO talking about work. Since fellow journalists tend to be my best friends — because we’re all too weird for anyone else — it’s nearly instantaneous that someone will start talking shop whenever we’re together. But I don’t want to talk about work unless I’m actually on the clock. I didn’t spend $2.87 to make a spaghetti dinner to listen to people griping about our jobs.
I also try to keep politics off the table, although nowadays that’s nearly impossible. No matter which side you’re on, the subject could not be more depressing these days, and I ran out of antidepressants to hand out with the dinner rolls.
It’s occurred to me to go to the pot store in our suburban neighborhood and supply gummies to everyone when they walk in the door, but it embarrasses me to go there. I’ve only been once, and I couldn’t help looking around the parking lot like one of my neighbors might spot me and turn me in to the KGB.
This is all a moot point, however, when you’re invited to eat at someone else’s house and you’re not actually allowed to regulate the conversation. This year, there won’t be any of my family there except Cheetah Boy, so we should all have a good time. (Actually, I do have a good time with my brother’s family, but they live far away.)
My 25-year-old daughter, Curly Girl, moved to Washington State in August, up near the Canadian border. She told me the other day she didn’t know what she’s doing for Thanksgiving, since I couldn’t afford to fly her and the babies back here. “I might just stay home by myself,” she said.
This irked me, because I feel like the birth family members who persuaded her to move up there to be close to them should at the very least be inviting her to a big family Thanksgiving feast, don’t you think? We’ve never missed Thanksgiving together since I adopted her at age 3.
It’s bad enough that it rains up there literally every single day and the sun hasn’t shone since August. I had to send her one of those special lights for seasonal affective disorder. Anyway, she is coming home for Christmas, so I’m looking forward to that. And praying we’ll have sunny weather. And come back next week, because I will be writing my annual column on surviving your family for the holidays.
Gobble gobble.