Thanksgiving

When I was young I loved Thanksgiving. I think it was my favorite holiday. Low stress due to lack of gift-giving pressure, lots of eating and drinking and those are things I do quite well, and enjoy.

Thanksgiving is still a nice holiday, and the meal is quite a reward, but it isn’t top choice any more. It is clearly because the family don’t gather for Thanksgiving any longer. One of my kids lives in England and annoyingly they don’t celebrate the holiday there – it’s just another Thursday work day. When we lived in England, there was no Thanksgiving celebration – often I was traveling for work. My oldest lives in Colorado and she doesn’t come home for turkey either.

Christmas is the big one. My wife looooves Christmas. Therefore we all are required to love Christmas, and we have learned to do so. They house gets decorated inside and out. We all seem to go overboard on gift giving, no matter how many times we try out proposals to tone it down a notch or more. We have Christmas traditions, meals, and the whole family gathers – it’s a requirement.

My older son got engaged this week – very exciting. He took his gal to our house in Maine, enjoyed the peace and quiet and proposed with a lovely diamond ring. He then made a nice Thanksgiving dinner. I think this may be the start of his own Thanksgiving tradition, but there was no need for him to come home and join us.

My youngest was here – probably because he didn’t have anywhere else to go – he starts work on a ski mountain in Maine in a couple of days, but why not hang around with Mum and Dad, have Thanksgiving dinner and watch moves and play pool. So there – we had at least a little Thanksgiving this year. All the kids sent photos of their own turkey dinners. I am thankful for that and for them. And I got to watch real football all day thanks to the World Cup – the NFL is always so boring, but never more so than on Thanksgiving.

That’s enough.