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Subject: |
Turkey With Dressing, No Stressing |
| Date: |
2009-11-24
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Turkey With Dressing, No Stressing
Well, many of you are anticipating Thanksgiving as not such a happy time. Maybe you've got kids in the military, maybe it's a divorce situation and you're not going to have your kid's visitation. Maybe the in-laws are a pain in the -- never mind. Maybe parents got divorced, re-married 18 times and there are 16 different families...it's like a tree that went [makes a branching out motion with hands]. Maybe it's just too much chaos for you to contemplate being able to really swallow dinner. That's understandable. I mean, these things are happening in life. I'm not going to be seeing my kid for Thanksgiving, because he's in the military, and it sort of takes the edge off it.
So if the situation is not really very good for you, in terms of anticipating Turkey Day, I'm here to help you. If you don't have people around, you can change that. Loneliness is a voluntary condition, and there are a lot of people you know who, for one reason or another, maybe they're living geographically so far away from family they don't have a place to go for Thanksgiving, it's time for you to invite them to your home. Even if you don't know them that well or [chuckles] maybe you're not incredibly fond of them, it's a time to bond. And you know there's something nice about sitting around a whole table, and everybody is starting to talk about, maybe Thanksgivings past. So the way you can get something out of this time is to give something.
So when I was in college and I would go home for Thanksgiving dinner, I'd always bring students who lived too far and couldn't make it home and we always had a lot of strangers around the table, and it really made it nice. It made it more meaningful.
Now, if you've got a lot of chaos in your family because of marriages, divorces and everybody is mad at everybody, and you think you have to go from place, to place, to place: give that one up. Don't bother with that. What I would do in your place is one of two things. I would say, "You know what, we have plans to go away and just have our little family celebrate Thanksgiving, peacefully." That's one thing you can do. The other is start a new adventure and a new ritual of having Thanksgiving in your own home, so you're not schlepping to everybody else's house, when they're not being cooperative and compassionate about the fact that you're fragmented by how they decided to lead their lives.
So have something at your house; invite everybody. You know, you don't have to have place settings if you don't have a table big enough, you can put things on a counter and have everybody (family style) take their stuff and sit anywhere in your house and eat and have 'chatterings.' And those people who decide "I don't want to come because I'm mad at 'so and so'" and "you invited 'so and so' and therefore I'm not coming. You should invite me, not them." Those types: send the invitation, they will sort it out and some of them won't come. And you know what that will mean? Your dinner will be more pleasant.
So there are ways to deal with it without shredding yourself from the inside.
Meanwhile, I'm waiting for my turkey...
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