Oh, Thanksgiving. That time of year where we’re supposed to celebrate family and friendship and all the things we are grateful to have. In all honesty, I’d just be grateful for some peace and quiet.
By the time this is published, Thanksgiving weekend will have come and gone, and the majority of us will be left with nothing to show for it. During Christmas, we receive gifts. On Halloween, we receive candy, and on Valentine’s Day, we at least get a card or a flower or two. On Thanksgiving, we’ll be receiving nothing but a few more pounds to our waistlines.
I’m acting a little cynical. I do honestly like Thanksgiving in some regards, but it can be frustrating in others.
For one thing, Thanksgiving is a time for socializing. I’ve found that now that I’m a reporter, socializing is sort of my occupation. How else do you get articles without talking to people and finding out what’s happening in their lives? Unfortunately, I know that I can be a bit of an introvert, so after a long week of talking to people, I like my weekends to be blissfully free of interaction. If you would like to spend time with me on the weekend, I have to psych myself up for it, unless it’s just a casual get-together.
Thanksgivings are not casual. They involve formal clothing for a formal feast, and they often involve serious topics of conversation. When I graduated from high school, I was to make conversation about what I hoped to take in college. When I was in college, I was to discuss what I was going to do when I was out and had a job. Now that I’m out and having a job… well, now what are we going to talk about? Whatever it is, it’s probably going to make me nervous, and thus I’ll spend most of my time refilling my punch glass.
Although that is a thing that also may come up: drinking. It’s traditional to have a glass of wine to toast around the dinner table, but I unfortunately am not a big wine drinker. I usually can’t stand the taste, and half the time I get served a full glass, I end up pawning off the rest on someone else. So what am I going to do this time? Should I only ask for a small portion of wine and look like I’m cutting back? Should I just go with punch? Or should I tell my sensitive tastebuds to suck it up?
Perhaps the most concerning Thanksgiving activity for me at least is being asked to say the dinner prayer. When I was a young child, I was the family’s appointed grace giver. A few days before Thanksgiving, my grandmother would call me, asking me if I could possibly come up with a prayer to say around the dinner table. When I agreed, I would then spend a few hours scouring books and the Internet for good prayers that I would then tweak and edit to my liking. Sometimes I’d even combine two prayers, or write a brand new prayer based on what I had read. It was quite the undertaking, but I was always thanked by my family for taking that time and always coming up with something good.
Unfortunately, recently I’ve become disenchanted with the whole idea of saying grace. Maybe it’s because in recent years, people just ask me to do it when I’m already at Thanksgiving supper, and I desperately have to improvise. Maybe it’s because after the year my little cousin said the dinner prayer, I thought I had passed the torch, only to be relied on the next year. Or maybe it’s because I’ve done it so many times that there is now a top 10 list of Schayla’s Best Thanksgiving Dinner Prayers, and my relatives are now able to match up this year’s offering and say it “wasn’t as good as the prayer of 2005.”
All I know is I’ve started flat-out refusing to take part in these prayer shenanigans, yet I always get roped into them anyways. Maybe next time, I should just make a prayer mad lib, and I’ll just change the nouns and verbs around every year until someone notices.
I suppose I am being a little harsh. Really, the Thanksgiving dinner is always worth the 60 seconds of awkwardness I go through trying to recite a dinner prayer. I love having an excuse to enjoy mashed potatoes and dinner rolls and perogies without the usual guilt of knowing I’m eating something ‘bad.’ Calories just don’t exist on special occasions. I can always deal with the guilt the next day! I know my sister should be making cabbage rolls this year after learning the technique from our late grandmother, and of course, we’ll have pumpkin cheesecake for dessert.
You might be thinking I mistyped, and that I meant to say pumpkin pie. Well, that’s a boring dessert for boring Thanksgiving dinners. Pumpkin cheesecake is my mother’s specialty. Mixing pumpkin with cream cheese makes a perfect combination of two of my favourite desserts. I only get to have it on special occasions like this one, so I often say I’m here for Thanksgiving just for a slice of that heavenly dessert.
The fact of the matter is that I’m lying. Even if Thanksgiving can be a busy, loud, embarrassing time, it’s a time for family, and I will admit to loving my family even if they drive me insane.
I’ll just really need a quiet weekend next week with no prayers to recite.
