Some Thanksgiving Thoughts

I've been abandoned.  Mrs. TANBI and Master TANBI are both clocked out for the day already.  We'd already pushed off from the family celebration when the youngest of all of us went down for the evening and our boy's normal volume level or perhaps the very real possibility he'd knock over a china cabinet would commit the reasonably unforgivable sin of waking the baby.  We decamped for the hotel and things proceeded apace from there.  Leaving me with two sleeping roommates, sitting in the dark watching football with the sound turned down, and doing this.

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What am I thankful for?  Top of my list these days is, well, still being around.  So there's that.  I'm thankful for a wonderful wife and a great son.  I'm thankful for all the family in my life, both on my side of things and my wife's side of things.  I'm thankful for the friends we have around us in our lives; great family friends - really framily, great work friends, and now friends we're making through the boy, and for the friends I rarely get to see and don't talk to as much as I should but that I always know are there.  I'm thankful there are people in the world who get up every day and do the right thing.

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Sometimes I wonder if we really need this holiday.  I love the sentiment, and I have memories that I treasure, but there have been stretches where it has seemed fairly inconvenient.  I think largely that stems from being an academic in a semester system.  Thanksgiving really jams up the tempo.  Things are getting into the endgame for the semester and then we go through this big productivity drop.  Then we come back for another flurry of activity and then we're done.  I guess it might feel different if the Thanksgiving intermission was restorative, but it always seems to be stressful in and of itself, with people coming back more harried as opposed to refreshed.  Given the choice I think many people would rather power through and finish a week earlier - getting a week longer break.  I know I would have wanted that when I was a student.

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The Black Friday thing seems out of control.  Some of the ads I saw showed stored opening at 2:00 PM on Thursday.  At that rate it seems more thoughtful for both employees and customers to open at 6:00 AM on Thursday and close at noon.  When we were changing locations tonight we drove by a Target and a Best Buy and the lots were packed solid at 7:30 PM Thursday.  I guess I must not be paying attention, or doing it wrong (you know, the same way I feel watching "extreme couponing") but there's never been anything that seemed like it would be worth the trouble.  I almost do see the appeal from an activity standpoint. The meal is over and you want something to do.  You don't want to go to the movies and pretty much everything is closed: let's check out the sales!  I tend to be more of a Cyber Monday shopper I guess.

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Growing up Thanksgiving was my great aunt Millie's holiday.  People would trickle in beginning around 4:30 for a dinnertime meal.  My dad was never there.  He had an annual convention that always overlapped with Thanksgiving - student government or something.  So my mom and my sister would go to the family event.  People in our family had their own signature dishes.  My mother was always the salad maker.  Millie did the turkey, but she also did Swedish meatballs as an appetizer.  That was always the first thing I had to eat.  She served buffet style, although that makes it sound more refined than it was.  After we ate the kids would all wind up in the master bedroom on the third floor of the townhouse piled on the bed watching TV: The Sound of Music or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or The Wizard of OZ.  I've probably confused the titles.  My parents generation would watch football and talk, their parents would play cards and deal with the kitchen.  The ride home would be pretty late at night for a kid.  I didn't know how special it was at the time.