I know that my role in this family is to make holidays happen. Not because they are holidays, but to create traditions for framing memories and celebrations to avoid getting lost in the mundane. I honestly don’t enjoy Thanksgiving. It’s a meal as a family. We eat meals as a family every day. Some of those meals are straight from cans and boxes, but some of them are pretty amazing. Thanksgiving feels like a manufactured day to buy the mandated groceries.

As a child, Thanksgiving at home was the required meal of turkey, cranberries and dressing. It was delicious, but so was everything that my mother cooked. Thanksgiving at my mother’s parents was the required foods with something new that my grandmother found in a magazine and venison. Venison was what they had in abundance, so that was what we always ate. Again, it was all delicious, but my grandmother cooked an obscene amount of amazing food every time we visited. Thanksgiving at my father’s parents was the required foods plus duck. My father’s mother loved duck and it was her holiday treat to herself.

It was food. It is food. I like food. I eat it every day. Eating food doesn’t cut it as a ‘holiday’ to me. It’s more of a stopwatch that declares it socially acceptable to get out your Christmas decorations.