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| The essentials. |
Thanksgiving
is not as flashy as Christmas, Halloween, Easter, Valentine’s Day or Fourth of
July. It stands alone as the least
commercialized holiday in the United States.
There is no specific ceremony or opportunity to give gifts. Of course it is still leaden with tradition,
heavy with the expectation to gather with family.
Some hate
Thanksgiving. Hate the traveling woes or
straight up hate their family. We all
have dysfunctional families. We all have
that one cousin or uncle that prefer to use the opportunity to air out
grievances or use as a battlefield to incite new blood feuds. Making the turkey course a little precarious
right up through the dessert course, consuming pumpkin pie absolutely mortified. This is the real reason there is a Kid’s
Table. Too much wine and too much turkey
lead to the reveal of the family’s most salacious secrets. That stuff is NOT for kids.
I used to
dread what my family would say about my eventual weight gain, as it was
customary for me to put on a few pounds after October. I would hate having to squeeze into my nicest
work clothes, as Thanksgiving was not special enough to merit a new outfit,
unlike Christmas or New Year’s Eve.
I would hate
the traffic to and from Austin to Dallas-Fort Worth for the Thanksgiving
weekend. Traffic once piled up so bad it
took me 8 hours to complete a 3.5 hour drive.
We hate other people rushing around, with little regard to anyone else’s
safety, to be with their own families.
Of whom we could care less.
But one Thanksgiving
was different for me. My father passed
away days before.
