Happy Thanksgiving, North Americans!

     As I wake up at 10 am, I realize it's the first Thanksgiving in years that I have nothing obligatory to do, no turkey to rush into the oven, no linens to iron, no bathrooms to clean, no harried last minute shopping to do, or send Dan to do and no tables and chairs to bring up from the basement, arrange, rearrange and arrange back again.  It's all being done elsewhere by others and I'm feeling that increasingly familiar prickle of loss vs. relief, a relief that isn't the "great sigh of" type but more the "well, how about that" type, so maybe relief isn't the right word at all.
     I use to say that Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday, our only obligation being to eat, drink and be merry but in those days it was my mother who did most of the work and we happily gobbled all day ignorantly blissful of how much work was being put forth for that twenty minute dinner.  I cherish those memories of each Thanksgiving spent with my Uncle "T" and Aunt Eunice and my four cousins.  My mother and Aunt Eunice would spend the day in the kitchen together while the rest of us played games, watched football, ran around outside, even threw snowballs a couple of years and generally just came to the table when the food was on it.  As we got older we would help with setting or clearing the table, thinking what a huge contribution we had made on the dinners behalf.  After hosting several Thanksgiving dinners where most of the guests participated by bringing a dish, baking the pies, setting the table and doing the dishes, the jobs that my mother would have done mostly by herself, I was always left exhausted.
     As a person in my twenties and thirties I would wonder why anyone goes through all that work for what return exactly?  The intangible parts of the day were lost on me.   We thanked god for the food and for those we have to share it with, wedging this third party into the deal.  All this work and god gets the credit?  Of course, I missed the bigger picture, the forging of memories, strengthening of bonds, the building of our own cultural connections etc...that is left for the elders of the tribe to think of, plan on and execute.  Now being an elder, especially with the passing of my own mother and grandmother, the very careful and important task of handing down these traditions along with their significance falls to me and my siblings. This is part of the loss I'm feeling right now, the obligation that gives us a purpose to the day, that sets this day apart from all the others of the year.  A day of hard work with an intangible return.  A day picked out of the year to celebrate family, friends and food and how much we love all those things and how important they are to us.
     Happy Thanksgiving!