Thanksgiving alone: Breaking the myths. The Year of the Pandemic
In this pandemic year, Beloved Spouse and I will eat Thanksgiving dinner alone, the meal brought to our door in three courses. Over on another thread, Peter says Thanksgiving is “aspirational.” I would say the favored “pictures” of the holiday are mythological.
Childhood Thanksgiving was filled with mythology. The Puritans’ “noble” quest for religious freedom. The cozy Pilgrim-Indian friendship. Norman Rockwell paintings, which we had in abundance. The family of several generations happily gathered. Even the wonderful deliciousness of the food. All myths. But we inserted our families into the myths and acted them out.
Post-war years in Iowa, the Thanksgiving family was my parents, me, my maternal grandmother and a divorced aunt with three children. Sometimes that meant a “children’s table”. That grandmother died when I was 9; the aunt remarried and moved far away. In another part of Sioux City, a different covey of Austins gathered with paternal grandparents. Since we had moved across town, my parents and I were not really part of that sometimes tumultuous “family,” except on Christmas Eve when we made the 40-minute streetcar ride to the grandmother’s house. I don’t think I ever heard Grandpa Austin speak a word. He sat in his chair, smoking a pipe, generally ignoring everyone. He died when I was about 13.
That year, I gained a “brother,” as we took in a 7-year old cousin, whose mother had died and whose father was unable to care for him.
Most houses in my neighborhood had only one child. A few went “over the river and through the woods” to be with older relatives, but most stayed home. We kids would sometimes get together after Thanksgiving dinner, taking our sleds to a nearby hill if there was snow.
Television arrived, with Thanksgiving specials, if we could get a picture that did not look like ghosts dancing in a snowstorm. When reception improved, it was the Macy’s Parade and – for some – football. We were adding to the myths of thanksgiving.
I remember one, maybe two, larger Thanksgivings at our house with distant relatives visiting Sioux City. One of my mother’s sisters, a heavy drinker on her second marriage (there would be three). Two families from my father’s side who lived in Mason City (considered far away in pre-Interstate days). My piano teacher next-door neighbor, living alone in the house where her parents had died that year.
In college years I had to connect with the family of the woman who would become Beloved Spouse. Not easy. No realized Norman Rockwell paintings there. And I was the interloper plotting to steal away the treasured First Grandchild.
Thanksgivings the first 10 married years were “just us,” maybe another couple (we couldn’t afford to feed a crowd.) No continuity, no stability. Seminary. Internship in Kingston, NY. Back to Chicago. First parish. Big move from Iowa to New York.
In New York, we assimilated the myths of longer-term friends, including a married couple, both Methodist clergy, the husband a journalist like me. Those Thanksgivings meant outstanding southern cooking (they were from Georgia and Tennessee), guests who were journalists, authors, and Methodist church executives. We were the only family with children. These were great times. But the husband finally came to terms with being gay; after an amicable divorce, the wife became a bishop’s assistant in Tennessee.
The myths were set aside in Europe. It wasn’t a holiday. Americans would get together on the fourth Saturday in November for the Turkey fest, arranging for the consulate in Geneva to supply us with cranberry sauce.
In the 1980s in New Jersey, Beloved Spouse and I became the host family. The number of chairs around the table varied, usually including the lesbian couple next door, our children (until Glenda went to Minneapolis for college), sometimes a girlfriend attached to our son, the divorced Methodist journalist, a older married couple with grown children, and one or two single schoolteachers. These, too, were very good years, and I truly miss the heavy work required to put it all together. (I know at least four ways to peel chestnuts; and all are difficult.)
One of these years, I had to be in the newsroom by 1 pm and work until 11, so the dinner went on without me (as did the dinner in the homes of the 100 or so other people putting out the newspaper.) I spent a good part of that day cold and wet at the scene of a fire, and the rest of it calling cops to see if any of the domestic disputes had resulted in an arrest or fatality.
Most of our friends “celebrated” similar Thanksgivings as changing, varied-myth festivals. Generally, the food remained, but little else. Furthermore, things in “the world,” civil unrest, political turmoil, church controversies, job insecurity, potentially fatal sicknesses and children of friends going through tough times were almost always present and intrusive to what was supposed to be a warm, cozy holiday.
Then came Minneapolis two years ago.
Daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren always spent Thanksgiving three hours from Minneapolis with his family, so – reducing and changing the myths – we joined the table of a brother-in-law who had remarried some years after the sister of Beloved Spouse died.
And now The Year of the Pandemic. We will watch what's left of the Macy's Parade on television. The kids are nearby, as the family-gathering myth of our son-in-law has collapsed. But we can’t be with them. We will do a late-afternoon drive-by to pick up some of their leftovers.
The myths of Thanksgiving. What a set of memories, experiences, changing locations, different faces around the table!
And each year, we find things for which to be thankful. I suppose we’ll do that this Year of the Pandemic.
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