The nightmare before Christmas isn't Halloween afterall--it's Thanksgiving!
Thanksgiving has always been my least favorite holiday. My memories of it are not exactly radiant--a cold, usually gray time of year in WI, but usually before the magical glow of first snow. As a child, I inwardly grumbled about how vastly inferior a holiday Thanksgiving was compared to the Christmas around the corner due to the glaring absence of presents. In my family, Thanksgiving was a tedious, quiet holiday.
Once I left home for college, I started contriving all sorts of ways to stop celebrating Thanksgiving with my family. I would see them in a month, anyway, and I resented aunts and uncles who came to holidays to get their family card punched and fall into silence for the rest of the year.
I started out by being overseas, and ultimately evolved into the tradition of celebrating the holidays with friends. In my mind, this made the event about people who wanted to be together, not who were obligated to be together.
Then, last year something happened: my son was due to have his second open-heart surgery the day before Thanksgiving, and we were to spend the holiday in the incredibly difficult immediate recovery period in the pediatric intensive care unit.
That event changed everything...I decided that never again would I feel sorry for myself on a holiday. I wouldn't take them, or any day, for granted anymore...if we were merely spending them outside the hospital, that was more than enough. And this year, an exceptional number of heart families I know were spending Thanksgiving in the hospital, some in dire circumstances, and I wondered how we could be so fortunate.
This year, I spent most of November reflecting on all there is in my life to be thankful for. It felt good--in fact, I can't recall a better November. But then, the day itself actually arrived, and I found myself and my son sick and running to the airport first thing in the morning on two hours of sleep. I almost got into an accident, my husband went out of state to visit his family, my son went to his grandparents' house, and my host ended up in the ER with her daughter...things were strained with my best friend, who'd just arrived from DC, and there was a meltdown of conflicting schedules and exhaustion. After 8 hours of driving, I ended up having to return home and completely missed out on Thanksgiving dinner.
I realized that I had measured having a "normal" Thanksgiving this year by whether we would be in the hospital or not. I thought I was returning to "normalcy," but how short memory is! There was never any normalcy to the holidays--not the ones I experienced anyway. Normalcy is actually what is abnormal for me.
Time and time again, I try to be something I'm not, live a life that is not mine, without remembering that I have been called to live an extraordinary experience. Why do I sometimes continue to try to reject was God has given me, and trade it for the mundane?
The holidays are the perfect time to allow oneself to be distracted from the prize by an iconic Rockwellian image, which makes us wish for what we think we should have versus the greater experience that God has given us.
This year, Thanksgiving was good preparatory training for Christmas. My eyes are set back on the goal, and my armor has been reinforced against drama.
What I can take away from this November, though, is the practice of lasting gratitude. In the coming years, it won't matter at all how we celebrate the actual day, because that's not that point of the holiday anyway. It is, afterall, just a gateway holiday to the coming winter celebrations.
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