Beautiful Disaster: Don Quixote's Thanksgiving

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.

Merited Holidays

So, this year I am the recipient of a new holiday called Mother's Day. Since this means I get an extra present ;) I started thinking about other holidays for which I've received gifts, and realized that I particularly savor the ones that honor achievements.

For instance, Christmas is pleasant as a general seasonal coziness and spirit, but as far as gifts go, Jesus was the one who got born (like that--"got born?"). I didn't really do anything. So why am I getting all these gifts?!

Birthdays: this time it was me who got born. But I don't remember it. And my mom did most of the work.

Wedding: Big deal. Having not even embarked on the marriage yet, talk to me in 25 years. If we're still together, maybe I'll think of this in terms of achievement and merit.

Baby shower: Felt proud, but let's face it. The gifts were for the baby, not me, despite all my delusions.

Graduations: now looking back on it, I've always felt proud of receiving graduation gifts (yeah, a high school, undergrad, and grad under my belt), knowing I really earned a bit of honor and celebration.

This first Mother's Day, I truly feel a sense of accomplishment, that I am worthy and deserving of a gift or laurel. It is not merely a feeling of participation in unabashed consumerism. I have earned it.

Speaking of unabashed consumerism, of which parties and celebrations have often become very thinly-veiled mediums, I've been asked about Himal's 1st birthday party. Ok...what?! Suddenly I'm being asked about themes! Didn't we just do "themes" last year for the baby shower and the nursery (oh, who am I kidding...there's no nursery...there's his room with some Winnie the Pooh stuff on the walls)? Unbeknownst to me (existing in foolish if blissful oblivion!), I've been informed by more seasoned parent-friends that kids' birthday parties are the current barometer of coolness. Forget the right shoes...in middle and upper middle class USA, suddenly it is the production of a birthday party that measures one's place in the world.

The thought of participating in such an atrocity raised 2 questions in my mind:

1) Why would I do this? and
2) Again, why would I do this?

Of course we'll honor Himal's 1st birthday. Of course we will!!! I already have the cake in my mind's eye--heart-shaped of course. Because as you may or may not know, Himal's got a pretty serious heart condition. It's going to be a celebration of a triumph...a triumph of making it through the first year...and it will be more meaningful than any store-bought theme.