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Thanksgiving is next week and, presumably, you know by now where you'll be eating that day. Or at the very least, whom you'll be eating with.
But if you're like a lot of people, the decision about when and where you'll celebrate the first of the celebrations we collectively call "the holidays" was based on factors that had little, if anything to do, with what you actually wanted.
Instead, you had conversations about how last year you ate with your husband's family on Thursday, so this year you really ought to get to eat with your own family. But, alas, your brother is working on T-day, so your family is celebrating Thanksgiving on Friday. Which is really inconvenient, because your teen-age son was going to try to snag a good deal on a Wii Friday morning and, also, because your ex-husband has custody of your daughter that day. But if you go to your mom's on the actual Thanksgiving day, she's only going to have stew, because she's saving the turkey for your brother. (!?) Besides, you really need to go to your mother-in-law's because she hasn't forgiven you for bailing on Christmas brunch last year, because that was going to be her last chance to get the whole family together before your sister-in-law got stationed in Hawaii. So you need to do better this year, or it'll only go to show that you don't really care about family, or at least not about your husband's family. So there. Thanksgiving at the in-laws.
Whew!
The whole thing is complicated enough even if you only have intact nuclear families who all live in the same general metro area. But hardly anyone has that, so it's more complicated still. If you've got to fly the family to LA, or even just drive them to Chicago, it makes it really hard to split your meal among several houses, even on two different days.
Complicated is not always bad. Sometimes, we make the mistake of pretending that our lives are so much more intricately busy and burdensome than prior lives. For my part of it, I can put up with a lot of "busy family life" negotiations in exchange for little niceties like not having to butcher my own turkey and not having to cook the thing with wood that I chopped myself.
Furthermore, every time I find myself feeling like "everyone wants a part of me," I remind myself of the years I had nowhere to go on Thanksgiving, when I was young and single and living in a new city.
Having lots of people wanting to celebrate with you? That's a good problem.
The challenge of Thanksgiving is the challenge of the whole season, and in some ways, of life itself. It's about learning how to accept what is possible, and what is not, and to chose one of the possible options and live with it. Sometimes, you just have to decide that you don't care what anyone thinks of your decision, or at the very least you don't care what some people think of your decision.
So what did you decide?
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Beverly Bartlett