Strategies For A Meaningful And Peaceful Thanksgiving
For many years, I lived alone as a single woman in cities where no relatives lived close by. Holidays were particularly painful times. When I first moved to Chicago, I had an apartment in a high rise where hundreds of other people lived. I could literally peer into the living room of the couple that lived in the building next door. I could even see what they were watching on TV. Yet I felt impossibly alone.
The feeling was more acute on holidays when I couldn’t get away to be with family. Wherever I lived, though, I was always fortunate enough to find people who welcomed me. When I was an exchange student in Paris, it was the family of a French friend the same age as me whose parents worked as the concierges in a building near the Eiffel Tower. My first year living in Washington, D.C., a friend’s large Lithuanian-American family invited me for Thanksgiving dinner — a day, by the way, I had to work as a young staff writer for The Washington Post.
When I moved to Chicago, a generous and gregarious Italian-American family took me under its wing. And when I worked as a correspondent in London, a Catholic priest I knew arranged for me to spend holidays with families from his parish.
Those were often lonely years before I met my husband. But they taught me something valuable. We might not have the family we want or the spouse we desire, but we all can have community. Robert Frost famously defined family as the people who have to take you in. Community, by contrast, is something we construct, through a thousand small acts of decency.
“We might not have the family we want or the spouse we desire, but we all can have community.”
During the Depression, artist Normal Rockwell created his famous “Four Freedoms” series. “Freedom from Want” depicted what most people recognized as a nuclear family — parents, grandparents and grandchildren gathered around a table about to launch into a turkey dinner.
The models Rockwell chose were all white. Today’s nuclear family might look quite different, as the artist Hank Willis Thomas and photographer Emily Shur showed in their series of contemporary re-imaginings of Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms.” Their “Freedom from Want” offers a mixed racial and multi-ethnic as well as multi-generational vision of family.
Today, family connotes more to me than blood relations. All who enter my life in a meaningful way are family. Now that I am married, I love nothing more than to fill my holiday table with a wide cast of friends, but also people I don’t know very well. People who might otherwise be alone.
My friend, the retired pastor Jim Bortell, writes with insight about the internal turmoil that holidays can cause:
“Thanksgiving is usually a happy-thankful time, but not always. It may come when the inward springs of the human spirit don’t match the outward festivities. The occasions for this are legion. They include family problems, losses, distress with what is going on in the nation and world, encounters with human suffering, and anguish about what humans are doing to the beautiful world in which we live. And this is the short list.”
“Thanksgiving is usually a happy-thankful time, but not always. It may come when the inward springs of the human spirit don’t match the outward festivities. The occasions for this are legion.”
With all the vitriol swirling around the recent impeachment hearings, and popping up in the presidential debates, this might prove to be a particularly challenging holiday season for families of differing political views, especially if Fox News or MSNBC forms the background soundtrack of our meals. So let’s turn down the volume. Let’s turn away from discussing quid pro quo, conspiracy theories, and who is perpetrating what lie.
Let’s feel gratitude that we have someone sitting beside us. Let’s be thankful for our ‘freedom from want’ and commit in the coming weeks to filling the needs of those who still live with want.
Let’s remember too that somewhere out there is a person who just might feel impossibly alone. What can we do to change that? As my friend Pastor Jim writes, how can we insure that our outward festivities match the inward springs of our spirit?
