The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
Marriage complicates the holidays; none more so than Thanksgiving. Christmas you can kinda, sorta turn into two holidays, Christmas Eve with one family and Christmas Day with the other, provided the two clans aren’t located more than a couple of hours apart. But Thanksgiving is a different matter. If the families are in relatively close proximity, newly married couples often try the “two meal” strategy whereby they have an early meal with one family and a later meal with the other, but if the drive between the two is much more than an hour that makes for a long, unpleasant day. And if divorce plays into the equation and there are more than two families, it becomes a logistical nightmare.
For the first couple of years I was married, I worked in retail and had to be at the store early Black Friday morning for a long, difficult day, so spending five or six hours on the road Thanksgiving Day wasn’t an appealing option. As a result, we usually had Thanksgiving at my parents’, who were only 45 minutes away, and then Janet would go to see her family over the weekend while I worked.
When I changed jobs and adjusted to a more “normal” (i.e. non-retail) schedule, we generally spent Thanksgiving Day with one family and the rest of the holiday weekend with the other. It was a one-for-three trade that everyone seemed okay with. There were exceptions, of course, including the memorable time we each attended our own family’s festivities. Without my wife’s “calming influence” I got into an ugly dust-up with my niece, stormed out and ended up having Thanksgiving dinner at Cracker Barrel.
Our first Thanksgiving in the Carolinas, 1995, we naively tried to continue the one-for-three strategy. We packed up the dogs and headed north midday on that Wednesday and arrived at my parents’ house after midnight, sleepwalked through Thanksgiving dinner and then headed toward Janet’s family, a nearly three-hour drive, where we zombied through another Thanksgiving dinner on Black Friday.
We left Ft. Wayne after church that Sunday for the extreme 11-plus-hour drive back to North Carolina. In the dark on I-77, in the mountains of Virginia, we ran into fog so thick we could barely see the front of our own car. On that stretch of mountain road, however, there are no exits and no place to safely pull off to the side, so we crept along, our only confirmation that we were on the road the ghostly red orbs of the taillights of the car in front of us. When we finally came to an exit and pulled into a gas station, I found my hands in a death grip on the steering wheel, my pale fingers locked in place. I turned to Janet, and in a voice that left no room for doubt or compromise said, “Just so we’re clear, we’re NEVER doing that again.”
And we haven’t, to this day.
In the years since that ill-fated expedition north, we’ve celebrated the holiday in a number of different ways. We’ve spent a few of them at friends’ houses, gone out to nice restaurants, hiked and then had dinner at Cracker Barrel, and prepared a few simple meals at home. Janet’s father even came down one year, and our nephew and his (then) girlfriend drove down another.
There’s something to be said for tradition, doing the same thing year after year, but I like the variety of trying new things and showing thanks in new and meaningful ways. This year, Janet and I will be walking in the Angels & Sparrows 5K then having a quiet meal at home. Angels & Sparrows is the soup kitchen where the community garden I manage donates most of our fresh produce. It’s a fitting way to begin Thanksgiving Day.