Thanksgiving 2025, Part I

Today is Sunday, November 23rd. 

It is now less than a week away from Thanksgiving. American Thanksgiving, anyway.

The PTO has been put in, the shifts at work are covered, the refrigerator/freezer and pantry are stocked with all of the Thanksgiving goodies we will possibly need for the holiday dinner. 

We're ready to go into a short week leading into the holiday weekend.

Now, I will note that for neither myself nor Daisy, it's an actual holiday weekend. Daisy gets Thanksgiving Day off only, and returns to work normal shift for Black Friday. I took Wednesday night before the holiday off, otherwise I would be getting no extra time off at all -- and I return normally next Sunday. So, both of us only get one extra non-normal day off, really. Daisy doesn't even view the day itself as a day off, really -- it's a "day of service" for her, so she says, as she generally cooks the entirety of the Thanksgiving dinner, aside from the real turkey and Mama's rolls. 

"I am happy to help you do it as much as you'll let me," I told her, "and you know this, but the reality is that you don't really want to let me."

And that's the truth. The long-suffering Daisy is very much a "do it herself" person, and the three big things she does -- the mashed potatoes, gravy, and stuffing -- there's not much I can do to help with those; they would not be "hers" if I helped. I want to clarify that statement, too -- she has magic, she has kitchen alchemy, and for as much as I love those three things, I can't make them worth a damn. My traditional Thanksgiving dinner for years when I lived alone, if I did anything special at all -- was Heinz gravy from a jar, Stove Top stuffing from a box, and if I didn't have real potatoes, potato flakes from a box was fine as long as I had milk and butter and some garlic powder. I was very cheap and very utilitarian.

Yet, Daisy and her mother are the best cooks I've ever known. My own mother is great too, of course -- and most of the time they've made stuff from scratch and look at me like I'm crazy when I've said in the past that my favorite stuffing is Stove Top from the box and that my favorite gravy was Heinz from the jar. 

That was part of the poverty mindset I had for many years, I suppose. And it's really hard to shake, almost like it's hardwired into your psyche as a survival tactic. It's like the people who want Kraft macaroni and cheese (Kraft Dinner for those of you in the great white north) instead of homemade, or would prefer a can of Campbell's condensed soup over a carefully crafted homemade soup. Growing up, I always thought it was a treat to get Velveeta shells and cheese as a rare splurge instead of the cheap Kraft mac and cheese or, horrifically, a less expensive generic version. My palate had not yet developed; I was poor when I lived alone (and we weren't exactly a high-roller family when I was growing up, either) and the $3 for the box of Velveeta shells and cheese seemed extravagant for just one meal -- after all, for three dollars, at the time you could probably get four or five boxes of the Kraft version. 

The holidays seem to be coming up very quickly this year, which has been a really strange thing for me. I prepared for months to visit my parents in NC and then go to Canada and come back, and it felt like for both of those, time was dragging so slowly it felt those trips would never get here. Now it seems like the holidays are ready to steamroll over us and we are woefully unprepared.

In reality, we're prepared just fine for Thanksgiving, as mentioned above. I am not prepared for the aftermath and for the following holidays of my birthday and Christmas. I am sitting here listening to Gord Downie's solo records and doing laundry. I am prepared for nothing. 

Of course, as Thanksgiving approaches, I think back to the Thanksgivings of my past -- the last big Thanksgiving dinner we had as a family, my own family, was probably 1999 or 2000. I am thinking it was 1999, as I remember I was in high school and Santana's "Supernatural" album was everywhere at the time. It was held at my aunt and uncle's house; they lived a mile or so from my grandmother at the time. It's the last time I remember the vast majority of the family being gathered together in one place; it was a simpler time, a much more peaceful time. Nobody was at each other's throats, my generation of kids were mostly still living at home (or, if they weren't, they were just starting to strike out on their own, get married, etc), and the family was still a pretty cohesive unit. I remember my grandmother calling my mother to point blank say "dinner's at four at [aunt and uncle's] -- when are you showing up to cook the turkey?"

My mother had the reputation of being the one who actually knew how to make a turkey correctly, and I believe there was some sort of history or running joke about that in the family, now lost to the ages. 

There are many things I remember about that final family Thanksgiving -- it was the year my mother made a wonderful green bean casserole and got heavily criticized for it. I remember the old aunts of the family, who smoked, just lighting up at the table -- in someone else's house -- like it was nothing, like it was expected, and the smell of that smoke slowly dissipating with nobody batting an eye. I remember my uncle asking me why I didn't come to his wedding, when I was (at the time) only halfway aware of it, and my cousin talking to her boyfriend on the phone and explaining to him who I was and why I was hanging out with her in her room -- something that was not unusual for me, as I grew up with my cousins, but apparently seemed absurdly threatening to a non-related boy on the phone. I was at the peak of my awkward, punk-rock goth phase of high school, weird and somewhat withdrawn with ill-fitting clothes, just wanting to be  I remember my grandmother, 72 at the time -- younger than Daisy's parents are now, younger than my dad is now -- sitting in the living room very content, peacefully taking it all in, surrounded by the family she helped create, none of whom would be there without her. She seemed so much older than that in those moments, or maybe it was us who seemed so much younger. She'd live another eighteen years, but she would never see us all gathered in one place for a Thanksgiving dinner ever again. The closest she'd get would be a few years later when about 3/4 of us would gather for an Easter dinner at another aunt and uncle's house in 2004. 

I've had many Thanksgivings at many places over the years. For multiple years running, we'd do it at the house of my dad's family, with all of his relatives. I've written about that, as well as the Christmases spent there, before at length. That started to wane and drop off in the early to mid 2000s. 

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that it was during Thanksgiving week in 2006 that I moved out to the midwest; my ex and her mother arrived in her father's truck to the house in West Virginia, helped me load everything into the bed, and then we made our way back across the country to Kansas City -- or, really, the farm community 25 miles east of the city that, for many years, I would refer to as "Smallville." We arrived at the family house around 4am Thanksgiving morning, and I woke up early that afternoon in a completely different house with a completely different new family, even completely different dogs -- dogs who didn't know me or trust me yet because I was an interloper. I had a wallet and a debit card to my name, a bank account with a few thousand dollars in it that I had saved, and everything that I'd deemed important shoved into the back of a truck -- and at the time I was the most free and untethered I'd ever been for the first time in my life. I didn't even own a cell phone yet.

Of course, all of that would slowly change over the course of several years. I'd have a few Thanksgivings with the ex and her family, Christmases too, and then a few years later would find myself alone again for all of those holidays, in yet another different state (Kansas), almost penniless but with a car, a roof over my head, and three cats. It was around that point I began to dislike the holidays and would become withdrawn and morose when I'd see Christmas lights or hear Christmas music, and would recoil at mentions of the holidays. I'd seal the Monte Carlo into the garage between college semesters, only venturing out to get groceries and cigarettes when absolutely necessary, and otherwise hole up. I had multiple people ask me if I'd like to do Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners with them as they knew I was alone (even one of my professors, actually) and I turned them all down as politely as possible. I was very much in the mindset of "I did this to myself, so I have to atone for it" for a few years there. Meaning, I'd gotten myself stuck where I was, and I had to live with those choices and let them make me feel the way I felt. 

That also changed, of course, in time.

Now, in the present, my Thanksgiving traditions are rather simple and mostly routine -- I take the Wednesday night beforehand off so that I can relax and sleep, and get up early on Thanksgiving morning. I caffeinate myself, I make sure I'm fully awake, and then I watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade while I prepare the Christmas cards for mailing the next day. This year, the first batch has already been prepared, and on Thursday morning during the parade I'll be preparing the second and likely third batches. There are 70 cards total, and I don't generally have more than a small handful of them left over at the end of the year. Daisy wakes up eventually and starts the cooking for the day, and eventually we venture over to the parents' for dinner, most of the food in tow. We will only return home with about half of it. I will pass out early in the evening or early overnight hours, and Daisy will go to bed at a reasonable hour as she will get up and work the next day while I browse Black Friday deals online. This has been the "tradition" of sorts for many years running now. I think I've only ever worked two Black Fridays over the entirety of my employment at my current job. On the first one, we had a potluck and played Cards Against Humanity for hours because it was just that dead, and on the second one it was quiet and a snowstorm was rolling in, so my boss just said to go home before the weather got worse. Past that, I've been the manager on overnights and I've never been scheduled on Fridays.

Ironically, for the new company I work for now, Black Friday is treated as an actual holiday, and it's a paid day off. I guess they figured that nobody stateside would do any work of actual substance on Black Friday anyway, and honestly...yeah, I kind of feel that sentiment as well. Nobody wants to be in the office on Black Friday at any company or business unless they're absolutely forced to be. Black Friday is for four things -- digestion, sleep, football, and impulse purchases. 

Last year on Black Friday, I started getting really sick, and found out shortly thereafter I had Covid. This was also after I'd gone out already and gotten the fish that we would name Lucy (who just died recently, as I documented here). Black Friday last year was the first day we had significant snow, as well -- as if the weather had waited until Thanksgiving was over and thought to itself "okay, we're in the Christmas season now, it can snow." Between the snow and the Covid, that weekend was miserable.

So, I guess, here's hoping for better this year. I'm ready to have a relaxing, comfortable Thanksgiving for once. It's just us and the parents and I have zero other plans.