My husband and I have spent every Thanksgiving in the recent past with his family. We’ve packed up our one, then two, then three children and made the 3.5-hour drive out of state, along with what seems like at least a million other cars. We gather with my husband’s parents, his siblings, his aunt, and his cousins.
There are downsides: The car trip is long, my kids never get enough sleep, I never get enough sleep, we all eat a lot more junk, my kids watch more TV… and it can be stressful to navigate family dynamics. As an only child, I never really understood that until I married into a family with many more members!
I always come back from the four-day Thanksgiving holiday feeling totally depleted.
And yet we’ve never even thought about not going, because we love to see our family. We love to see our kids play with their cousins. We love to hear the same family stories. We are reminded how important it is to have our family, and how much we have to be thankful for.
This year, of course, is different.
We are following the recommendations and staying home. Our Thanksgiving celebration will be our immediate family only. The older generation is not in good health, and we’ve chosen not to put them at risk. We’ve gone back and forth a hundred times, trying to figure out a way to do Thanksgiving safely. But there are just too many uncertainties. Personally, the anxiety that my family could pass COVID to someone else, or get it from someone else, is a burden I don’t want to carry.
A more intimate Thanksgiving holiday isn’t the one we wanted. But maybe it’s the one we need?
Maybe a smaller, quieter Thanksgiving is better for our own mental health. After the year we’ve had, maybe we need to keep our stress levels lower. Is the best thing we can do for ourselves this season to just give ourselves a break? We don’t have to travel, we can sleep in our own beds, our kids can stay on their routines, and we can cook a smaller, more manageable meal.
Reframing Thanksgiving in this way might help us manage the disappointment we feel about not gathering with family. Let us all remind ourselves that the reason we’re choosing not to gather this year is so that we can ALL be here to gather together in the years to come.