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November 26, 2005
Thanksgiving tough questions
Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays because it is so simple. The basic structure of the holiday is that you get a day off from work so that you can eat dinner with your family. The funny thing about this is that because the structure is so simple people get very stressed out about the holiday. You should be able to eat dinner with your family once a year, right? My philosophy about Thanksgiving, having experienced the odd phenomenon of people having near nervous breakdowns on this simple holiday is as follows:
“Don’t take Thanksgiving too seriously.”
The basic challenge as I see it is that Thanksgiving makes each person answer a number of major questions in a social situation that tend to linger unanswered for a long period of time and once opened lead to a number of painful discoveries.
Tough question number 1: Who is in my family?
While this may seem to be a simple question there are a number of situations in everyone’s life that tend to make figuring out this question a sticky proposition. The first category of these is whether estranged people should be considered part of the family. Some families I know have to split Thanksgiving into the two estranged halves of a pair of sisters or a child and parent who no longer get along. When a father doesn’t approve of the lifestyle of their gay, drug addled, or politically contrary child Thanksgiving is the perfect time for the child or parent to express their distaste for the other’s lifestyle by not inviting them or refusing to come to Thanksgiving. If the invitation does get extended in a hope to patch differences then it is a good way to create some fun fireworks at dinner once the source of conflict is raised.
Single people in a relationship face the tough decision of evaluating their current boyfriend or girlfriend to determine whether they are ready or appropriate for provisional inclusion in the family. I have seen Thanksgiving break-up relationships because suddenly two people realize that their significant other is not really significant enough to make the transition from a cool friend to a family insider. One friend of Sarah’s made a realization about her relationship when neither she nor her boyfriend even discussed whether they would go to each other’s Thanksgiving meals.
For those people orphaned from home or orphaned from their whole family they need to figure out within their circle of friends which family they can latch onto in a pinch. At the same time families, who know who the orphaned roamers are can get competitive for the roamer to commit that their extended family is theirs. In general these orphaned roamers are the easiest component of Thanksgiving but they present an interesting wild card just in case everything looks like it is going to work out.
People also face the challenge that they are often in a relationship where they have more than one family to tend to. So if each person has a significant other with their own family to define then a family of 8 people can quickly balloon into expanding this question into 16 different families causing a massive web of conflicts when it comes to including all of the families in one place at one time.
Tough question number 2: What is an acceptable family dinner?
Every family that I know has a group of people who don’t agree on the ideal food. Vegetarians generally don’t like turkey and can be disturbed by the focus on killing animals either in general or in non-humane anti free-range fashion. So there is always the added stress of whether the whole family, once it has been determined, can sit in the same place and eat the same meal. Meat eating people like myself don’t want to be downtrodden by the vegetarians and vice-versa leading to some fun food related tensions around things like segregation of stuffing, gravy, and seating. Ethnic differences can often come into play. The movie “The Feast” shows some of the variability of conflict in action. People also make mistakes with the food. At one Thanksgiving, an Asian one, they accidentally purchased a smoked turkey instead of a plain one and it tasted awful to everyone there.
People also never can collaborate to pick an appropriate time for dinner. The party people want to go out in the early evening to see their high school friends who are in town to see their family for a few days. The general variability of eating schedules for a large number of people makes it tricky to schedule the whole family. Some people won’t eat before dinner time out of fear that they will throw off a carefully constructed diet conscious eating schedule.
The schedule challenge often gets complicated by question number one challenge of people being included into multiple families. In my case the basic issue is that you can’t be in two places at once so I need to go to two different Thanksgivings that by logic should be at two different times. This is doable if both families are in the Boston area but never worked too well when my girlfriend's family was in upstate New York. One solution to this is to move the holiday a full day or week away for one family which is often my preference.
I can imagine that a gigolo lifestyle or a couple of family divorces could lead to the split problem on a far larger scale. It isn’t just a logistical challenge because not appearing is an admission that one family half is more important than the other which also can lead to flying cranberry sauce.
Tough question number 3: Can we pull off the logistics?
The logistics of the Thanksgiving meal are already handicapped by the complexity of the planning process around the holistic questions of defining families and meals. But the meal itself involves a lot of timing on many people’s parts. The advent of cell phones may help to co-ordinate people who are late but it also has led to people trying to time dinners more precisely to come and go near meal times. I would like to see the cell phone usage chart on Thanksgiving. I used mine about twenty times this year because it always takes more time than expected to get the baby out the door and we had a little problem walking a Husky. I can only imagine, having seen Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, how complicated traveling during peak travel dates from a foreign city to see my family would be. Someone also thought it would be a good idea to have people cook things that take over seven hours to prepare like turkey in order to complicate the logistics so that while people are already stressed out about their complex web of interpersonal relationships they also get further stressed when the expected food to calm them down is still raw because it wasn’t placed in the oven soon enough.
So Thanksgiving is an anthropologists dream to study the American human getting stressed out over the simple task of eating dinner with the family. I have enjoyed it more than ever the past few years not just looking for trouble but seeing people together and having fun chatting with people in my family who I don’t get a chance to see every day. I also love complex logistics and enjoy watching a good fight every now and then.
Posted by dhousman at November 26, 2005 08:23 AM
Comments
Love your "Thanksgiving tough questions" post! Excellent! Thank you for writing that!
Posted by: Ginny at November 29, 2005 07:08 PM