My first Thanksgiving at my beau’s family table, I hid in the bathroom a half-dozen times to check my watch. Can we leave yet?
Despite the lifelong ache to have my own regular family, with generations of happy family gatherings, and despite the steady, routine absence of all that — thank you addiction, suicides, and estrangements — I resolve to not let my dread of others’ family holiday gatherings show.
“Go where the happiness is,” the therapists chant. And I have. For decades. But the reality is that there is a muscle necessary to steel one’s heart so we can keep walking in and smiling at other people’s families. That muscle keeps getting trained. Weight trained.
I’ve hosted many non-familial Thanksgivings, full of the lonely, the broken, the single, and the alone, this year, for whatever reason.
I roast the turkey, decorate, set the table, and light the candles. It is lovely. Often, we stack dishes and move to the piano. I throw great parties, so we haul out all the Billy Joel, Olivia Newton-John, and Beatles lyrics, and we have a sing-along.
We have dessert and dessert wines, and maybe coffee with liqueurs. We banter about the best pecan and pumpkin pies we’ve ever tasted and swear to make the French bourbon cheesecake someone had in Italy for next year’s gathering.
It is joyful in its way — boisterous, tipsy, unorthodox.
But it is not family. We are not related. We do not share private medical information because high cholesterol and a weak heart run rampant on your father’s side. We did not, together, hold our mother’s hand when she passed. We did not attend each other’s children’s births, as blood-related people often do.
It’s a meal, held on a holiday.
At some point, you meet someone somewhere along the way and now you’re sharing their family’s holiday celebration, one populated by someone else’s blood.
This is the part where you’re supposed to feel grateful. And there are moments when you do. But if your family members are addicted, or died young, or suffer mental illness or are a combination of any of that, you are reminded anew that these dynamics are often multi-generational. Addicts take hostages. They do not have relationships. So if your family is in that pool, holidays can only be peaceful with other people.
And sometimes they are not your relatives.
What no one wants at any family holiday table is bitterness, mental illness, or unresolved substance messiness. No one wants the sad facts of real life to puncture the bubble of happy, shared, familial history revisited at the holiday feast. If blood is that, then attending someone else’s Thanksgiving, or just chucking it and going to a movie, is the default.
I am hardly alone. A 2024 Boise State report says that 61% of Americans experience sadness or loneliness during the holiday season and 37% would prefer to skip the holidays entirely.
A November 2024 Harris Poll found that 50% of U.S. adults are currently estranged from at least one close relation, and, among those, 35% are estranged from an immediate family member such as a parent or sibling.
And that is often the most verboten element, the one never brought up but often fibbed about to the others who are clinking glasses, laughing, and reminiscing: estrangement. Who wants to talk about being forced to choose peace over calamity when choosing peace means being alone?
There is stigma in estrangement. Assumptions are made, faces turn dark, and holiday meal revelers suddenly need to take the dog out because estrangement is sad. Estrangement is a bummer and, especially to those who’ve never experienced it, suggests the notion that it may be your fault.
Whether it is or is not, the result is the same. You are not with them because being so is impossible. That is the heartbreak. Moreover, heartbreak can feel amplified when you’re with those who don’t know this sorrow.
It can be so very lonely, even — often especially — because you feel you’re the only one.
My beau and his family graciously include me in their holiday gatherings. This is a loving and lovely gesture.
But it can be hard not to feel the loss of one’s own blood, not being there. It is his daughter who serves her famous sweet potato casserole. Those are his in-laws who turn on the game and then lovingly bicker.
In the past 10 years, my sibling and my daughter died young. In the previous 10 years, another sibling died young, and yet another the previous decade.
What if that 61% of Americans who, according to the Boise State study, feel sad during the holidays did not have to pretend joy-to-the-world at others’ joyous occasions? What if holiday tables and the people populating them realized that half of their holiday table is struggling mightily?
Is it possible that the holidays and the people who gaily celebrate them give 30 seconds of thought to the 50% of U.S. adults currently estranged from a close relative?
Maybe, collectively, the holiday and all the joy-to-the-world memes might hold a tender spot for those with the tenderest of hearts.
Yes, we can volunteer at homeless shelters, and yes, we can help serve Thanksgiving dinner to those who cannot afford one. Volunteering can and does help mend broken hearts.
But maybe we’d like to be at the table, our souls and hearts broken wide open, guts and all, for all to see, to bear witness. No one’s trying to kill the party. But there’s nothing like a forced party to turn the knife even more.
I know that feeling, this and speaking to it is not popular. After all, if 61% want it to all be over with as soon as possible, then 39% love every Hark-the-Herald note of it.
Maybe there’s room for both. That is what I am saying. Maybe the spectrum can provide love and thanksgiving for both. Maybe your widowed uncle across the table, whose son is in a group home for early-onset dementia, doesn’t feel up to raising a glass.
Maybe he does not feel up to being around people and so stays away as a buffer against others’ group gaiety.
But he may be up for someone taking him a plate. He may be up for a conversation about his garden. He may be up for that.
And maybe, from November through January 2, we could all remember, perhaps even seek out and comfort that 50% suffering estrangement or that 37% who want it all to be over with.
Cathie Beck is a Denver journalist and author of the award-winning “Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship.” Her new memoir, “Hoodbitch on the Near Eastside,” will be released in 2026.
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