Home for the Holidays

Seldom have we needed a Thanksgiving more than we do this year. Time for family and friends to gather around a groaning table, gorge, engage in heated political debate and bicker over whose stuffing recipe is, in fact, the all-time favorite. By the end of the week, two members of your extended family will no longer be speaking to one another, most likely a result of one insulting the other’s overly salty mashed potatoes.

That’s what we’re all hoping will happen, anyway. That kind of cacophonous continuity would be comforting right now. We all know this Thanksgiving will be different. Even for those of us left personally unscathed by the horrible events of the fall, this holiday is swathed in sobering responsibility. We feel the weight, suddenly, of how grateful we are, and we acknowledge the painful fragility of happiness.

As we all head home this Thursday, be it ten blocks from work or clear across the country, we are changed. We vow to slow down, to revel in our good fortune. We vow to appreciate the people we love — and perhaps more importantly, to appreciate the people we can’t stand.

Make yourself at home

These gatherings change so little year to year because the holidays are a time for reminiscences, not for moving ahead. We save our forward momentum for December 31st. No matter how busy everyone is, there’s always time to review past tribal traumas, including but not limited to the time Aunt Edna mistakenly included a raw egg in her gravy and everyone was vomiting for days. Ancient customs reemerge the moment you walk through your parents' familiar front door. You and your little brother are both grownups now, but you still can't stand the way he refuses to rinse out the bathroom sink after brushing his teeth, and he's infuriated by your insistence on using your personal spoon to serve yourself at the dinner table. ("Germs are everywhere!" he reminds you. "And I don’t want yours.")

On holidays we all revert back to our younger, less confident selves, trying desperately to mesh our adult existences and expectations into the sticky and alluring web of childhood roles and memories. This year, we vow, we will behave like someone who has her own apartment, pays her own bills, holds down a steady job and negotiates the pitfalls of a long-term relationship. We will not dissolve into tears when well-meaning neighbors ask us when are we getting married, already. We will not stomp up the stairs and kick our bedroom door closed if someone questions our take on the plight of Afghan refugees. We will, in short, behave like a real person.

That resolve generally lasts about ten minutes. Before we know it, we’re sticking our tongue out at our brother’s retreating back or insisting that we can make these cookies on our own, thanks very much, and no, we do not need help. (Later, of course, we feel grouchy when no one eats more than one cookie because we misread the recipe book and put in tablespoons of salt when it called for teaspoons.)

And as far as I’m concerned, that’s just fine. This year, perhaps more than ever before, we all need the therapeutic effect of the mundane, the expected. We want to make the same stupid jokes we make every year. We want the gravy to be a little bit runny, because that’s how we remember it. We want to lock horns at least once with our siblings, exactly the way we always have, before everything changed.

Taking stock

It’s all about pinning down that fleeting idea of "normalcy." So even as our vague frustrations dim in the shadows of real-life terror and true bravery, and past slights are overlooked, let’s make a bid to hold on to what we know. Sure, we will be enormously pleased to see everyone — from our parents all the way down to Bob, our recently paroled third cousin twice-removed. This Thanksgiving, we may even be able to forget what was said all those years ago about our 10th-grade prom date. And all this will happen because we have confronted our own demise, and faced the prospect of never having a family dinner again. After September 11th, those of us left personally unscathed have a responsibility to be enormously grateful for what we have. That doesn’t mean, however, that we forget to appreciate the way our nearest and dearest can get under our skin in sixty seconds flat.