One Less Turkey

After countless years of getting out of bed early to stuff a turkey and bake two kinds of pie and fix cranberry sauce and green beans and stuffing and mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and eating the same thing as everyone else for dinner for some reason I don't understand and which isn't even based on reality -- apparently the Pilgrims did not have turkey when they feasted on Plymouth Rock or wherever they feasted -- I am not doing Thanksgiving this year. It's enough already.

I am happy and sad about this simultaneously. Happy because I'm free at last, but sad because I only do it for my son to give him memories of a happy family dinner after I'm gone, but it's never happy. In fact, our biggest blowouts have often happened over this meal. So he'll have to content himself with memories of all the other Thanksgivings I've made since his birth 38 years ago.

Besides, my own mother never made a Thanksgiving meal, not once. She was a terrible cook and would not even know which end of the turkey to stuff and I still loved her anyway. (Fortunately my grandmother could whip up that meal in her sleep, so I was not deprived of this ritual as a child.)

Perhaps if we lived somewhere other than Maine we would be invited to dinner at a friend's house. Alas, that has not happened in 15 years here, where family is all that matters and strangers are considered strange. Anyway, one less turkey will be eaten this year. At least that's something.