Thanksgiving: Not Just About Turkey Now 

Thanksgiving is huge in my family. HUGE. As a child, it was a week-long celebration that began with seafood dinners (broiled lobster and steamed clams with shrimp scampi), continued with the traditional turkey dinner and ended with weekend meals of chili and spaghetti.

It was normal to send everyone home with leftovers that really amounted to entire family meals. I mean, how many other people do you know who can say they were able to take home an entire pie, dozens of cookies and enough food to repeat Thanksgiving for three more days.

Welcome to my Thanksgiving memories.

As an adult, things change. You go off, you get married, you develop new traditions. At least, that’s what I’ve heard you’re supposed to do. In all my years with Mr. Ex, we spent maybe five Thanksgivings together. My family had traditions; his family had traditions – and neither of us cared enough to rock the boat. That meant he would spend holidays with his family so as not to offend them and I would do the same with mine. We tried splitting holidays by dropping by each celebration, but that made us crazy and exhausted; we tried alternating holidays but that ticked off our relatives. In the end, it just wasn’t worth the battle. So we gave up.

As a single woman, it was exciting for me to return to just worrying about me for the holidays. I’d spend Thanksgiving with my family and then host Christmas for friends and coworkers who had no place to be. It was heavenly to me.

Now that I’m with DramaGeek, we are both back to figuring out how to handle holidays. The nice thing about the two of us is that we’re open-minded and able to articulate our thoughts. The challenge is that sometimes we are so open-minded that we never articulate our true desires and never come to any conclusions.

One conclusion that we have managed to make about the holidays, though, is that we do not want to spend them apart. We believe that sets an example to our family that we don’t value our relationship, and we want to make sure now that it’s understood we are a package deal.

It’s a deep line drawn in the sand.

The line creates challenges. For instance, my mom is all alone. His mom is single as well, but his sister and her husband are also local. His family is very insular and uncomfortable in social situations that involve outsiders. My mother, like me, loves having a house full of people for the holidays. It’s what makes a holiday special for us.

So, how do we reach a compromise? My idea was a group holiday that we host. I would do all the work, if everyone would just show up. But that is really outside of his family’s comfort zone. They would just rather get together for a couple hours and then part ways. As much as they enjoy each other, solitude is welcome as well.

For Thanksgiving, it’s been decided that we will just go to my family’s celebration and work out a way to celebrate with his family at another time.

Christmas is a little more challenging. Ultimately, we’re going with DramaGeek’s idea, which involves having breakfast with his family and me hosting dinner for us and my mom. It’s not ideal, but it’s not bad either. And the fact is that I think we are very lucky that his family isn’t as demanding as mine. Compromise is much easier when there is a little wiggle room.