Giving Thanks

Jump to Comments

My favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, has come and is long gone, but I wanted to take this opportunity to share some of my all time greatest hit memories from the turkey related holiday. Maybe then I will attempt to tackle the nightmare known as the December holidays.

I love Thanksgiving for a plethora of reasons. It is about giving thanks, which we should all do each and every day, but sometimes the nuances and responsibilities of life get in the way. It is not a “Hallmark holiday” like the upcoming Valentine’s Day or Halloween, both wonderous holidays for the candy industry.Thanksgiving is a holiday in which the focus is spending time with good friends and family,to appreciate those people and everything you have. It is also about eating way too much, getting into your fat pants right after dinner and getting comfy on the couch with your football fanatic male relatives or gossiping in the kitchen with the female relatives while they prepare dessert, or in my case, in recent years, being the designated baby sister for all children present.

As a little innocent girl, before the term “politically correct” came into our every day vocabulary, I dressed up as either an Indian (the feathered kind) or a Pilgrim. (I later learned that “Indians” were actually “Native Americans” and also not not even from India. In fact that were named “Indians” by Columbus who sailed the ocean blue looking for India, but “discovered” our fine country instead. Don’t even get me started on that rapist killer!) Each year I would alternate. For my Indian attire, I would wear a tank top and my soccer shorts, since, as I learned from the text books that lied to me throughout my youth, Indians didn’t wear much clothing. Then I would create a beautifully vibrant headdress made of a thick strip of brown construction paper taped together at the ends. Then with a pattern representative of the fall foliage, I would cut out red, orange and yellow feathers, also made of construction paper, and tape them to the brown halo of construction paper. Then I would sing “One little, two little, three little Indians…” both vocally and in sign language, taught to me by my 2nd grade teacher.

For my Pilgrim outfit, I chose the male ensemble. I guess the outfit seemed easier to put together. I wore my brown corduroy knickers with my green soccer socks pulled up underneath and my tap shoes on my feet. These were the closest footwear I had resembling the buckled shoe of the Pilgrim. I’d wear a white button down shirt with the collar pulled up and make a Abraham Lincoln-esque hat, again, out of construction paper. Mrs. Ugarte never taught us a song in sign language for Pilgrims so I just walked around being stiff, as I imagined Pilgrims to be.

While trying to recreate the first Thanksgiving through crafts and interpretive dance, I would watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Meanwhile, my teenage brother and sister slept off their hangovers. I never understood why they were always “sick” on Thanksgiving until I later learned the night before Thanksgiving was the biggest party night of the year, according to my brother.

So the arguments that inevitably ensued when we needed to start getting ready to go to my aunt’s house were:

Mom to brother and sister: “Yes you are going. No I don’t care how bad your headache is. Take some Tylenol.”

Mom to me: “Yes I think your Indian outfit is really great. No, you are not wearing it to your aunt’s house.”

Mom to dad: “Yes you are going. She is your sister. I don’t care how much your side hurts, take Pepto Bismal!”

Ahhhhh…the memories.

One year while my uncle was carving the turkey on Thanksgiving, he sliced right through his finger, almost down to the bone. He and my aunt headed to the emergency room and the rest of us stayed and ate, thankful he didn’t cut his entire finger off, and that he had already cut the dark meat.

Another time at my aunt’s and uncle’s house, my cousin decided to invited her new in-laws. I had the pleasure of sitting across from her new hubby’s brother, who would not shut the hell up. Not only would he not shut the hell up, he was dropping f-bombs like he was Andrew Dice Clay. I don’t think I had ever seen my uncle so enraged. He asked him to leave the table, threw his napkin of the floor and with clenched jaw went to have a “little talk” with the potty mouthed guest. We were all pretty f***ing thankful when he decided not to come the following year.

Then there was the time my mom decided to host Thanksgiving. There were two reasons we always had Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house: 1. There was much more room at their house than at our house. 2. My aunt is a fabulous cook and my mom is… really great at cleaning. OK, my mom has a lot of outstanding qualities–giving unconditional love, organizing, dealing with other people’s medical bills, going over her minutes each month on her cell phone–but being a good cook is not one of them. She is not a bad cook, but she is not particularly a great cook either. It’s ok though. We still love her lots.

However, for some reason, my mom really wanted to play the hostess for once, so we had Thanksgiving at our house. I especially thought it was a great idea because maybe then I’d have a chance to wear my Indian outfit. No such luck.

So my mom went shopping, got the turkey and all the accoutrement to have a Thanksgiving feast. She woke up early to put the bird in the oven. A little while later I woke up due to a peculiar stench coming from the kitchen. I thought it was the smell of burning plastic. When we opened the oven, smoke came pouring out. Sure enough, my nose was correct in its assumed aroma. My mom had forgotten to take out the plastic bag inside the turkey, the plastic melted and burned. The 20 lb. once-feathered gobbler had died in vain.

We ate Chinese that year.

My most vivid and excruciatingly painful Thanksgiving memory was Thanksgiving 1982. I was in Kindergarten and my mom was the class parent. She and my teacher planned a full on Thanksgiving feast with the entire class. We decorated the classroom with the colorful turkeys made from our tiny traced hands. Each parent brought in a Thanksgiving dish. We put all of our desks together so we had one long table just like the first Thanksgiving. It was beautiful….except for one thing. We were assigned to dress as either a Pilgrim or an Indian. I was hoping to be an Indian but I got picked to be a Pilgrim. I cried and cried. Somehow I knew the Indians were the better people. I knew they were truthful and honest and much more laid back than their Puritan counterparts.

I put my knicker, soccer sock, white button down, tap shoe outfit together, but my mom wasn’t going for it.

“My friend’s daughter was a Pilgrim at her feast two years ago,” she insisted. “So you can borrow her outfit.” Mom wasn’t, and still isn’t, the “let’s buy fabric and make a costume from scratch” type and I guess a new outfit wasn’t in the budget, so I agreed to wear the hand-me-down Pilgrim dress. I was OK with it…until I found out who we were borrowing it from: an overweight 2nd grader who nobody sat with on the bus because she took up practically the whole seat!

I couldn’t believe my mom was making me wear a fat girl’s outfit. I was not fat! OK, I was a little chubby, I admit. Two years earlier when my sister bought me Jordache jeans for my third birthday I couldn’t button them over my baby Buddah belly. But now at age five, I had gotten a bit taller and slimmed out. I was ashamed to be seen in her outfit. She was a really nice girl and all, but after the Jordache incident, I was already having some body image issues.

I ended up wearing the outfit, which looked absolutely ridiculous. I looked like I was a daughter Pilgrim wearing mother Pilgrim’s clothes. If only I had been picked to be an Indian like my friend Dani. Her parents bought her the coolest brown suede outfit and little moccasins. There is a picture of me from that day outside the kindergarten classroom. I have the fakest smile on my face and there is a little girl in the background (probably a younger sister of one of my classmates) staring at me with a look on her face that plainly says, “What the hell are you wearing?”

But this did not take away the joy of the day…well maybe it did just a little. Despite being in a fat girl’s dress, I was thankful my mom was there to celebrate the day with me, unlike most of the other kids in my class whose parents worked. I was thankful we got to take home the leftovers since my mom was the class mother. I was also thankful my friend Jamie was a Pilgrim too and comforted me when she saw how mortified I was.

These days I don’t dress as either a Pilgrim or Native American. My aunt and uncle have since moved to Florida and celebrate Thanksgiving with their retirement community friends. My mom won’t dare have Thanksgiving at her house after the burnt bird incident. Instead, we all come together to give thanks at my brother’s house, where my sister-in-law and her parents rule the kitchen, my brother rules the remote and the kids are thrown in the basement to play until dinner is ready.

I don’t have to cook. I don’t have to watch the kids, since my sister-in-law’s niece is old enough to watch them now. I can just relax, look around the room and reflect on those around me…and despite the kitchen chaos and the men screaming at the television and the occasional crying, hurt child piercing my eardrums, despite all the dysfunction…I am thankful.

5 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized