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.
Showing posts with label holidays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holidays. Show all posts
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
What a Depressing Hallowversary
Halloween is my favorite holiday.
I'm not sure when it started winning over Christmas, but I do know I was fairly young. I have many many memories of very happy Halloweens as a kid. Hell, my mom announced to me and my sister on October 27th 1994 that she and dad were getting divorced and I still managed to have a happy Halloween that year. It would have ruined Christmas.
We grew up with ALL the animated Halloween specials. The radio stations play Vince Guaraldi Trio's "Linus and Lucy" at Christmas time but that's how It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown starts. It will always be Halloween music to my ears. I learned the origin of the word "Halloween" from the 1970s special The Halloween that Almost Wasn't. And who wouldn't want a night rollicking with a slightly crazed witch like in Witch's Night Out? Plus good luck hearing "Werewolves of London" outside of October.
Then, in my mid-twenties when I became a pagan, Halloween took on the spiritual significance that had always been the only thing missing from the day. My favorite holiday becomes a double holiday? Sign me up! Samhain is, for many pagans, our spiritual New Year. It's a good time for me to make a resolution or two considering National Novel Writing Month starts the next day.
In 2006 I was still working but my health problems were becoming a work problem. I went home early from work at the candy store that Halloween. For the first time I was really, truly depressed on my favorite holiday. I didn't even dress up for Halloween. My poor, terrified, ex-Jehovah's Witness husband got stuck with handing out candy that evening. I sat down in front of the TV and worked on a little decorative box on which I was trying to recreate the sky from Great Pumpkin (impossible, by the way, unless you're an actual artist).
We had started watching MSNBC earlier in the year because CNN was driving me nuts and MSNBC seemed to have a little bit of sanity on it. And that night we flipped over to MSNBC during the 8pm hour. In 2006 at 8pm on MSNBC was Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
There are several reasons why this moment of first finding Countdown is stuck in my head forever. If we tuned in very long before the Worst Persons in the World segment, I wasn't paying much attention. But it was Halloween and when Toccata in D, which had always been Dracula's Theme in my head, started I paid attention. What stuck even more was what the guy on my TV was saying. He was calling out hypocrisy, and general douchieness. No one on TV did that except Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and they were comedians! This was on an actual news channel!
The next night I wanted to see more of this show and see if the Worst Persons bit had just been for Halloween. Of course, it hadn't been. I was hooked, my husband was hooked and we have been ever since.
This year we're losing the house we bought with a predatory loan in late 2005. The house is barely decorated because I couldn't see the point of unpacking stuff that would just need repacked when I was already packing the rest of the house. I'm not dressing up, though I do have a witchy outfit planned for handing out candy. And this year I won't close out trick-or-treat by watching the election and hurricane recovery coverage on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Tonight I will be lighting a number of candles for friends and for all those affected by the storm, and we will be donating to storm relief efforts.
I'm not sure when it started winning over Christmas, but I do know I was fairly young. I have many many memories of very happy Halloweens as a kid. Hell, my mom announced to me and my sister on October 27th 1994 that she and dad were getting divorced and I still managed to have a happy Halloween that year. It would have ruined Christmas.
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| Halloween 1997 |
Then, in my mid-twenties when I became a pagan, Halloween took on the spiritual significance that had always been the only thing missing from the day. My favorite holiday becomes a double holiday? Sign me up! Samhain is, for many pagans, our spiritual New Year. It's a good time for me to make a resolution or two considering National Novel Writing Month starts the next day.
In 2006 I was still working but my health problems were becoming a work problem. I went home early from work at the candy store that Halloween. For the first time I was really, truly depressed on my favorite holiday. I didn't even dress up for Halloween. My poor, terrified, ex-Jehovah's Witness husband got stuck with handing out candy that evening. I sat down in front of the TV and worked on a little decorative box on which I was trying to recreate the sky from Great Pumpkin (impossible, by the way, unless you're an actual artist).
We had started watching MSNBC earlier in the year because CNN was driving me nuts and MSNBC seemed to have a little bit of sanity on it. And that night we flipped over to MSNBC during the 8pm hour. In 2006 at 8pm on MSNBC was Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
There are several reasons why this moment of first finding Countdown is stuck in my head forever. If we tuned in very long before the Worst Persons in the World segment, I wasn't paying much attention. But it was Halloween and when Toccata in D, which had always been Dracula's Theme in my head, started I paid attention. What stuck even more was what the guy on my TV was saying. He was calling out hypocrisy, and general douchieness. No one on TV did that except Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and they were comedians! This was on an actual news channel!
The next night I wanted to see more of this show and see if the Worst Persons bit had just been for Halloween. Of course, it hadn't been. I was hooked, my husband was hooked and we have been ever since.
This year we're losing the house we bought with a predatory loan in late 2005. The house is barely decorated because I couldn't see the point of unpacking stuff that would just need repacked when I was already packing the rest of the house. I'm not dressing up, though I do have a witchy outfit planned for handing out candy. And this year I won't close out trick-or-treat by watching the election and hurricane recovery coverage on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Tonight I will be lighting a number of candles for friends and for all those affected by the storm, and we will be donating to storm relief efforts.
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