A colleague forwarded this story about happiness to me this week. I have read Dan Gilbert's book which I found worthwhile although a tad redundant. One point that I found useful was that what we imagine something to be and what it really turns out to be are two different things. And it's important to get a grip on what the imagined part is based on.
One woman is cooking Thanksgiving dinner for her six children, their spouses, significants, eight grandchildren and ex-husband in ex-husband's house, because it's the only place large enough to house everyone. Her reason for doing this is "my children want me to cook for them." She was fuming because one of her sons wanted to invite her ex-in laws too. There is no love lost between the long suffering cook and her ex-mother-in-law. Now, whose fantasy Thanksgiving is she trying to create? And is this even possible? Or rational? From the outside it seems like everyone is pretending that Mom and Dad didn't get a divorce.
I'm not faulting her because there is a lot of this that goes on within families, including my own, especially at the holidays. We bump into Hallmark and Norman Rockwell images right and left. We carry within us long faded postcard images of childhood holidays, which we magically hope we can re-experience. But sometimes what we re-experience is a lot of hurt and rage..like Uncle Ike has to take one more dig at how much weight you've gained or how bald you are, as if you didn't know, or Grandma lets you know she doesn't approve and never has approved how you are raising your kids etc. etc. One young couple grabbed their their little girl and in a huff left a family gathering after Grampa said that the child was retarded. Ah, families!
In thinking back, the traditional Thanksgivings have blurred together in my mind. It's the off beat ones I remember like the family gathering in Boston my sophomore year in college. We went to old North Church for services, paid our respects to Plymouth Rock and ate dinner at the Top of the Hub with a panoramic view of downtown Boston. There was another year in college where we cooked a goose with a bunch of friends in the kitchen of a Baltimore row house. We ate so much that we all ended up taking a nap between courses. Some years later, I recall eating fresh lobster as a newlywed when hubster was a young resident and we couldn't be with our families. I kept the lobsters in a crate in the kitchen and was amused as they rustled around. There was last year's flat mail-order turkey, or memories of the dreadful inedible green olive stuffing. And there were the poignant gatherings like the one at my brother's house right after Dad was released from the hospital after a nearly fatal episode of heart failure. He was so painfully thin and weak. It was his last Thanksgiving with us. As the years pass there are more of those empty chairs.
Three years ago I did a big blow-out Thanksgiving dinner for 25. My sister-in-law and I had an unspoken agreement for years that I cooked Thanksgiving dinner and she did Christmas. But things had changed. Our families were expanding, another family had joined us, and both of us had gone to work. The day after, a colleague asked how my Thanksgiving had been. I moaned that I was exhausted after spending all day in the kitchen. He looked at me and asked "Then why do it?" That was a very good question and a question I have asked myself every year since. Anyone for hamburger?
No comments:
Post a Comment