Growing up, I had the most 50s sit-com family that could possibly exist in the 1980s. Dad was a firefighter, Mom stayed home with me and my sister until she got a part-time job (just for the hours we were in school) when I was about 8. I didn't have a bad holiday experience until I was in my mid-twenties.
My mom and her two sisters used to rotate who had what holiday at who's house. We also used to switch back and forth between celebrating with Mom's side and celebrating with Dad's side. It was the only holiday we needed to split. All this continued even after my parents got divorced in 1995.
Then at some point, probably when Mom was moving houses, she and her sisters stopped rotating holidays and one aunt always has Thanksgiving, one has Christmas and Mom has Easter. In 2001 we had our last Thanksgiving with Dad's side because his step-mother (the only Grandma I'd known on that side) passed away the following April. Grandpa went to live with my Uncle in Cincinnati, and that was the end of big Thanksgiving get-togethers on my dad's side.
Somewhere along the way, Mom, who hates turkey the rest of the year, reached the point where she was tired of never having Thanksgiving leftovers to munch on for days on end - turkey, cranberry jello, stuffing, Mom's mind-blowing pumpkin pie... So she started cooking a Thanksgiving dinner the Friday or Saturday after Thanksgiving and we'd stuff ourselves again that night and nibble on leftovers for days, the way things should be.
We have a Canadian friend who we often invite down for Thanksgiving since Canadians celebrate their Thanksgiving at an appropriate time for a harvest festival. So she usually brings a bottle of wine for Mom, a bottle of wine for dinner, and some Canadian smokes for my sister. We head to my aunt's to gorge ourselves, come back to Mom's on the verge of a food coma and moan with happy discomfort. We also have a friend from Michigan who we met the same day as our Canadian friend. When Canada is visiting, Michigan usually comes down to kill two visits with one road trip, but not until after Thanksgiving.
So the second dinner Mom cooks every year started being our Thanksgiving with friends. Our local friends got to know Canada and Michigan over the years and we started inviting some of them to the dinner Mom cooks.
And thus, slowly but surely, what has come to be known in our family as Second Thanksgiving (thanks, Tolkien!) was created. It's now truly a second Thanksgiving dinner. We could have as many as 17 people at Mom's this year - bigger than our normal family dinner! My sister has called Second Thanksgiving "Like Thanksgiving, but with people you like!"
Since I actually like most of our relatives, I prefer to think of Second Thanksgiving as "Thanksgiving with the family we chose."
Whatever you're up to this weekend, whether you're celebrating or avoiding the holiday like the plague, I hope you're with people you love.
