Widow Alone on Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I’ll be having a quiet day home alone with a roast beef in the crock pot. Boo hoo, the grocery store didn’t have any turkey legs but I did pick up some cranberries and a pumpkin pie. So there’s that to set Thanksgiving apart from a normal day and I’ll stay off Facebook until after the weekend. No sense torturing myself with photos of happy families celebrating. 

I had a two hour brunch with my Gathering Girls pals on Monday and I’m chalking that up as my day of thanks and gratitude. And why not. I am grateful for these friendships that came in my post-widowhood life. They might not be the kind of friends that I could call in the middle of the night and say, “I just killed someone” and they’d say, “We’ll be right over with shovels and a bucket of lime” but when I need comradery and lots of laughter I know it’s on tap twice a month. By the way, that was a joke about the murder and the lime. I’d never kill someone---I apologize to bugs when I wack them---and if I did I’d want my friends to help me go to the police and confess. And if you’re a friend reading this, please note that I’m not your go-to person for a shovel and a pail of lime in the middle of the night. No one is that good of a friend…past, present or future.

Since my husband died, this time of the year I’ve been over-dosing on Christmas movies on the Hallmark Channel. That’s sounds strange, I know, considering what I just said about staying off Facebook around the holidays. But watching fictional strangers celebrate is different. I can poke fun of them and their often under-researched storylines, the fake snow and the over-abundance of lonely and alone people and how every one of them magically finds love by Christmas Eve. But I watch the holiday films because they give me a sense of tradition when all the old traditions have slowly seeped out of my life in recent years.

One of my favorite movies to pick apart is based on a plot that involves a woman hired to decorate a house for the holidays and she’s worried about the fact that she only has two weeks to complete the job she’d already been working on for a week. When I was in the floral business I did those kinds of jobs for rich people, but my employer would have gone broke if I had taken that long to do them. What you don’t do is literally spend 9 to 5 every day for three weeks inside a house putting up bows, holly and tinsel while falling in love with the bachelor/home owner. Watching that movie year after year is my Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’m a cult fan of one.

And then there’s the movie based on emptying out the humane society for Christmas when most of those kind of places suspend adoptions over the holidays because it’s not a good time to introduce a new pet into a family. But my favorite nitpick to make in holiday movies is how often the characters walk around outside with no winter coat or in high heels when there's a foot of snow on the ground. The only people who do that in the Snow Belt are college kids who are rebelling against a lifetime of their mom’s yelling at them to come back inside and put on their coats or boots. Every time this topic of dressing for the season comes up a fellow blogger, who also lives in Michigan, comes along and shares/brags that she acts more like a 20-something than a 70-something and I’ll write back that even in the house I wear fingerless gloves and layers of clothing. I wouldn’t want to test the theory but I’m guessing if we were both stranded outside in a snowstorm---her coatless and me dressed for the weather---I’d probably be the one to die of exposure. Death doesn't follow any rules. Good men die and nasty ones get elected president.

Okay, let’s get down to the reason why we celebrate on the fourth Thursday of November. We all know that supposedly Thanksgiving evolved from a feast the Pilgrims had in October, 1621, to celebrate their first harvest in the New World. But it wasn’t until 1863 that the entire nation celebrated a fall harvest all on the same date and that came about because Lincoln proclaimed that “Evacuation Day” would become a national day of "Thanksgiving and Praise.” Prior to the Civil War, Evacuation Day was November 25^th and it commemorated the date when the British withdrew from The States ending the American Revolution. More tweaks happened over the years landing Thanksgiving on the 3^rd Thursday of the month. Yadda, yadda, yadda and now it’s a day when families watch the Macy's Parade on TV, then stuff themselves and and maybe go around the table so everyone can share what they are thankful for.

What am I thankful for? Lots of things including a home to shelter me and my might schnauzer, food for our bellies, money to pay our bills, extra money to donate to organizations helping with the wildfires out west, the election that put the House in control of the Democrats, and a world that---at the moment---is not hosting a nuclear war. Oh, and I'm thankful for Hallmark holiday movies because they remind me that love always wins in the end. ©