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For a Better Holiday, Add Weirdness
By Jody Rathgeb
QuailBellMagazine,com
With the holidays come many bits of advice on how to manage them with less stress. Most writing in this genre is supported by some sociologist, psychologist or time management expert. I am none of the above. For credentials, I have only the large number of Thanksgivings and Christmases (more than 50 of each) I have survived. Thus, my advice:
Forget perfect. Go for weird. Perfect holidays, or the attempts at creating them, lead to boring similarity. Traditional this, traditional that, and sooner or later you can’t remember one from another. Was it in 1998 or 2002 that Aunt Betty and Fred argued about the source of the family cranberry sauce recipe? When was it that we switched from the twinkle lights to the old-fashioned big ones? How old was I when we stopped putting out cookies and milk for Santa? Traditions are all very nice, but they don’t make for stand-out holidays. The weird things, though … that’s what you remember. Of all my Thanksgivings, with family and substitute family and pseudofamily, only two really stand out. The first was the time when my sister and I, while setting the table, discovered that there were no candles for the table. Leaving Mom to cook, we set out to find candles in a year that pre-dates pre-Black Friday store openings. Funny, but 7-11 doesn’t carry a large selection of centerpiece tapers. We were hoping for a fall color, or even white; we returned home with the purple candles that we recall to this day. The second Thanksgiving to Remember was in 1984, when my husband and I were in the middle of a move across the state of Pennsylvania. Tom started his new job just before the holiday, so we were already in our new apartment, but the moving truck had not yet arrived. Without furniture, cookware, dishes, family or friends, we nevertheless had a Thanksgiving feast: Takeout pizza on the floor. Doing something odd or different is also the basis for all the Christmases that stand out in my memory. All the toys under the trees from my childhood run together, but I’ll never forget the four automobile tires in the living room on Christmas morning … Dad’s unsentimental gift to my mother, who greatly appreciated it as we all laughed. Long after that came the Christmas I was still awake when my sister and her date came home and the three of us stayed up all night drinking and talking. And the Christmas the Pipes Froze—hey, mind if we come early to dinner and take a shower at your place? And our first Island Christmas with a decorated palm tree. You can’t replicate true weirdness, but some of our goofy additives have become their own traditions. Tom and I never make a traditional Christmas dinner for Christmas; each year we decide on something new and different, such as homemade Vietnamese pho, Turkish lablabi, bouillabaisse or (this year) homemade gnocchi. Every Thanksgiving we make sure to listen to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.” And when we assemble our manger scene, we always include something odd: a spaceman, Godzilla or a giant live cat. We recently made a turkey dinner and still have its leftovers in the freezer, so for Thanksgiving this year we’re going to remember one of our first and make pizzas. No traveling, no family gathering, no football. Just us and Arlo and pizza. How weird is that? How un-stressful is that?
#Real #Essay #HappyHolidays #WeirdHolidays #Memorable #PerfectIsOverrated
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