When I was a little kid, Christmas was the very best day of the year. I'd often spend summer days calculating how many more days I'd have until Christmas. I loved going into New York City to see Santa at Macy's, loved being in the Christmas pageant at church, loved singing Christmas and Hanukkah songs at school, loved the candlelit Christmas Eve services, and really loved the sleepless anticipation of Christmas Eve night. I even loved the agony of sitting with my brother and sister at the top of the stairs on Christmas morning while my mom made hot chocolate and my dad turned on the Christmas tree.
I've been shopping for Christmas since late September. We took the pictures for our Christmas card the first weekend in November. I wrapped presents this weekend and now I'm outlining my holiday baking. Christmas is a lot of work. That's probably why my mom, who professes to love Christmas, has a breakdown every year at the Christmas breakfast table once all of the presents are opened.
Maybe it's because I married someone who doesn't delight in the magic of Christmas (who told our then-5-year-old that Santa Claus doesn't exist last year). Maybe it's because I do all of the shopping and know how much we've already spent to make this Christmas magic. Maybe it's because I foresee spending several days over the next two weeks on my feet in the kitchen, rolling cookie dough into tiny balls and cutting out thousands of stars with my little helpers. Maybe it's because I'm eight months pregnant and cranky and all I really want for Christmas is to have this baby out of me. But whatever the reason, I'm not feeling the Christmas spirit yet this year.
The more I think about it, I don't get into the spirit of most holidays in the same way I did when I was a kid. Easter no longer seems to be about candy and bunnies, but instead worrying about how long I can leave the hardboiled eggs out before we risk food poisoning or about my kids going psycho in sacrament meeting after consuming too much candy. Halloween is all about finding the perfect costume for each kid and then hiding the candy from the kids so they don't eat themselves sick.
When I was a kid, Thanksgiving really wasn't a great holiday. It was sort of a blip on my radar between Halloween and Christmas, signifiying only that we could start listening to Christmas music. Worse were the years when my parents dragged us to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was always cold, always crowded, and always hard to see. I think most little kids share my point of view. This morning, Annie, my 4 year-old, volunteered that she doesn't like Thanksgiving because all of the adults tried to put too many weird foods on her plate. But as all of the adults were sitting around on Thursday afternoon in a state of carbohydrate-induced nirvana, we decided these are the reasons why Thanksgiving is the best holiday for adults:
1) There's so little that has to be done ahead of time. Yeah, I did spend Tuesday grocery shopping and making pies and stuffing and Wednesday cleaning my house, but when you compare that with the weeks and months of preparation that go into Christmas, it seems like very little work. With four adults in the kitchen (Eddie's brother and his wife came from Dallas for the weekend), we got most of the work for dinner done in an hour in the morning and an hour right before dinner.
2) There's no religious guilt at Thanksgiving. At both Christmas and Easter, I always find myself feeling bad because I get caught up in the commercialization of the holiday and don't think too much about the religious roots of the day. With Thanksgiving, we sometimes share the things that we're thankful for and always say a nice blessing over the meal, but let's face it, the day is about food and lots of it, with no messy religion to complicate things.
3) The food just gets better as you get older. Eddie and I both have memories of people putting weird food on our plates at Thanksgiving. We consider ourselves pretty middle of the road when it comes to the fanciness of the Thanksgiving meal. At my house, we never had the same thing two years in a row and my mom loved experimenting with things like pearl onions and brussel sprouts and always put at least 30 things in her stuffing. We were all expected to taste a little bit of everything, no matter how bad it smelled. At Eddie's house, the stuffing was stove top and the green beans were canned. Now that we're the adults, we can decide which things we want to have on our table and on our plates. The mashed potatoes, for instance, are always plain (no experimenting allowed there) and we must use the same sweet potato recipe every year, but otherwise I can be a little bit creative. And it's always totally yummy.
4) You get to see people you haven't seen in a long time. When we were kids, I didn't really care about seeing my aunts and uncles. I didn't have cousins who lived nearby, and certainly didn't have a lot of cousins my own age, so I didn't really care who we saw on Thanksgiving. But now that we're adults and our siblings live all over the place, I love getting together. I've known Eddie's little brother since he was 12, so I've watched him grow up, and now that he's a medical student and married with a baby on the way, it's fun to see him as an adult too.
5) Thanksgiving doesn't carry a lot of expectations. Other than good food, you can totally feel free to vegetate and sit on the couch on Thanksgiving. And falling between Halloween and Christmas, it just seems like a nice little break from the crazy commercializion of the other holidays.
So there you have it, folks, from now on when people ask me what my favorite holiday is, "Thanksgiving" will be my unequivocal response.
--originally published 11/27/06
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