Tradition

The first year I spent Thanksgiving away from my family was 2002. I was living in Virginia and for such a short break it didn't seem worth the time and money. But sometime around October I started feeling homesick, maybe not so much for home but for Thanksgiving - dinner and games and wassail, tossing a football in the backyard, the post-Thanksgiving Christmas craft fair, a movie with the cousins, my own traditional Thanksgiving morning run out by the golf course and the river. I couldn't imagine being happy with someone else's Thanksgiving, and so I changed my mind. I called my parents and they found me a National Airlines plane ticket, and I let myself get excited.

Maybe you paused for just a second on the phrase "National Airlines plane ticket" because National Airlines flights don't pop up on Expedia searches these days. That's because National Airlines suddenly and permanently ceased operations on November 6, 2002. They'd been operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and you might think purchasing a Thanksgiving flight through National Airlines would have been a risky venture. But this was 2002. Most airlines were in distress. It never occurred to me that I'd find myself with a ticket that couldn't be honored just weeks before the holiday, and when it happened, it was a much bigger disappointment than if I had planned to come home for Thanksgiving all along.

One of my colleagues in my high school math department, Flo, invited me to have Thanksgiving with her family. My roommate also invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at her aunt's house, but Flo was insistent and I accepted her invitation. As grateful as I was, the dinner felt strange to me. The traditional Thanksgiving dishes were all there but they were somehow bafflingly different. The potatoes had the wrong color potato skin, the turkey was cut neatly instead of piled onto a big serving platter, the yams had no marshmallows on top, the cranberries were in a relish instead of a jelly.

The social atmosphere was strange, too. Flo's teenage children and several of their friends loaded up paper plates and took them to the basement to watch movies and play video games, while a miscellany of adults (Flo's relatives? neighbors? other National Airlines patrons?) gathered in small clusters at card tables and chairs set up haphazardly around the living room. I ate and conversed awkwardly, then retreated to a Scrabble game in the corner with another teacher from our department (divorced and family-for-Thanksgivingless) and his college-age son.

I decided that year that spending Thanksgiving alone is less sad than spending Thanksgiving with someone else's family.

I was back with my family the following two years, but then I moved to Michigan. Thanksgiving was easier in Michigan because I had more friends who stayed there than I'd had in Virginia. If you're not going to spend Thanksgiving with your family, it's a lot more fun to spend it with other people who also aren't spending Thanksgiving with their family. We made new traditions together - 5K's and board games and folding tables from the Institute building. The traditions were different from my family's traditions, but they weren't foreign.

This November was my first Thanksgiving back with the family after six years away. I learned that a lot of traditions have changed since I've been gone. I don't feel the same attachment to family Thanksgiving that I used to, but in a way that almost made it feel like more of a special occasion.

Once upon a time when I was maybe ten years old I stayed up late one Christmas Eve to watch It's a Wonderful Life all the way through for the first time. Before that year, my brothers and I had always spent Christmas Eve sleeping on the floor of their bedroom, talking and giggling and burrowing into the sleeping bags with flashlights as though we were mining for gold. It was tradition, and the year that I stayed up late to watch It's a Wonderful Life I broke the tradition. Irreparably. By the time I went to bed it was too late to drag out my sleeping bag and join my brothers, and from that year on we slept in our own rooms.

I didn't feel guilty. In fact, I felt kind of grown up. I loved my brothers and I loved our tradition. But I also felt that it was a tradition, like many, that had to be grown out of, and as the oldest child I was willing to push forward the growing-up bit. I've always kind of felt that way. Way back when I first planned not to leave Virginia for Thanksgiving it was partly because that felt like the adult thing that I needed to do. It turned out that I wasn't quite ready to grow out of that tradition that particular year, but because I was forced to anyway it became that much easier a few years later in Michigan, and I grew out of one tradition and into new, different, happy traditions of my own.

My little sister has always been different. Just as my desire to push against tradition may stem partly from being the oldest child, her desire to hold back tradition probably stems from being the youngest. Traditions changed more quickly for her, often before she was ready. Just when she would get excited about a particular way of celebrating a holiday, her older siblings would begin to decide that they were too old to celebrate that way. So she pushed back, and it was because of my sister that a lot of traditions stuck around as long as they did.

I think these two attitudes don't clash so much as they balance each other. The truth is that traditions have to be fluid. Children grow up, grandchildren are born, lives change, tastes evolve, interests shift. This year I probably noticed more than anyone how much our family Thanksgiving has changed, since most of the changes occurred incrementally and I was gone for six years' worth of increments. But there's a lot of value in the traditions that stick around. I went off and formed new traditions, and it was comforting to come back and find just how much had stayed the same.

If there has been a theme to my adult life it's the push and pull of novelty and stability. I long for change, and I long for familiarity, and I often feel that when there is an emptiness in my life it is because I think finding one means giving up the other. I think happiness in life must come from learning to live with and love both, and to appreciate that sometimes they come in different proportions. I haven't learned how to find that balance yet. But I have moments when I sense it.