For three years now, we’ve celebrated Thanksgiving in our Australian home in a manner some back in the US would call “Friendsgiving.” As of last year, I got wise and found a local restaurant to throw money at in exchange for an entire cooked turkey, rice stuffing (not nearly the same as Southern dressing, but we make do), and gravy, and everyone else takes care of the sides. The kids get the inside table (by the Christmas tree, and some Christmas crackers, because we like to blur lines between the two holidays) and the adults sit outside in the waning sunlight, food piled high on the fine china I found just this year and was therefore making its Aussie debut atop the red tablecloths I use/dry clean annually.
This year, we were #blessed with a performance by some of the younger kids of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and, for the second year running, all of the kids set up an upstairs spa with my foot and back massagers and booked us in all evening for appointments.
It’s pretty effing magical.
It’s also a change from the way I used to celebrate Thanksgiving (aka The Last Day Before the Official Start to Christmas Season). Absent are the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Westminster Dog Show in the background; there’s nary a sausage ball in sight; football doesn’t make an appearance until the next morning; it’s more sundress than sweater weather. You could say, also, that the family element is missing, though at this point, I think it’s just a different kind of family.
I’m thankful for all of it, deeply, because I’ve been here for all of it and I know the faithful hand of grace that has carried us here, so far across so much. I’m thankful that, for some reason (personal growth? therapy? grace? all of the above and more), I didn’t have a breakdown in front of the oven this year but instead just steadily went about the business of planning and baking and pulling things out of said oven that didn’t taste like shit. I’m thankful for emotional regulation, for neurological integration, for high-sounding concepts that become realities over time and increase quality of life almost as much as the dog currently lying on my feet does.
I’m thankful for what isn’t. E.E. Cummings wrote, “the Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself,” and I have unlearned some things. I’m thankful that the world is wider than I ever knew, that the unexpected and unplanned for can be gifts beyond compare, that the ocean is not just my favourite metaphor for life but also a part of our every day. Tangible love, tangible grace.
Just in time for Christmas.
One comment on “Thankful”
Changing traditions do bring about ups and downs and often create full circles presenting revised editions of old familiar events. Have you read Anxious People yet?I just finished it and saw so much of myself hidden away in the ridiculous story and the needy, quirky characters. One of my favorite lines from the book is (to paraphrase) “Even though you think the world might end tomorrow , plant an apple tree.” I’ve planted a lot of trees in my time, always with a little prayer that they survive after I’m no longer around. It’s the continuity and the stability that I craved, and the hope that they and the world would mature into something stronger and vastly more beautiful than what the future often portends.
Dear Ref, you are an apple tree in a different land, blooming and giving generously of yourself despite all the scary minutes and hours and days and years that sneak by. And, by the way, I am one of your greatest admirers.
Love, Jane