Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is sort of an odd holiday for me. I love the feasts, but the day itself was never particularly important in my family. We don’t have a big extended family — I’m an only child, my mother is as well, and my father has one sister who never married. My parents had cousins, but they lived far away and we were never very close to them. On top of that, my parents’ relationship was, er, strained and they divorced when I was in high school.
This means that Thanksgiving didn’t really have the traditional “let’s all gather together and be thankful for each other” meaning for us. At best, we were thankful that nobody was throwing anything or hitting anybody.
Now that I’m living in Pittsburgh, Thanksgiving is becoming more important. We do the big family dinner each year with Laura’s family. She has a half-dozen siblings, so the Thanksgiving feast is the sort of pile-all-the-tables-together extravaganza I’d heard about but never seen as a kid. We all sat around one table, even if we were eating at my grandparents’ house, and there was no point to a kids’ table that would only have consisted of me. Laura’s immediate family alone is twice the size of my usual holiday dinners, and there are usually at least as many guests and friends as family members.
So, I’ve gone from 3-5 person dinners to 16-20 people. It’s been an interesting change. Even if family relationships get strained, it’s nice to visit and see everyone, talk, and eat. In the six or seven years I’ve been eating there, I’ve grown very used to it.