This will be the first year that we’ll be spending Thanksgiving at home. Usually we trade off on going to either mine or Anne’s parents each year—this year would’ve been my parent’s turn—but this year both Anne and Courtney have to work Thanksgiving day. So we won’t be making the trip and instead will have a small dinner of our own at home. I have Thanksgiving and the day after off so I’ll probably spend part of it playing WoW while the ladies of the house are at work. It’s a little weird not traveling for a change.
I can recall from my childhood trips to my maternal grandparents for Thanksgiving most years and I can recall that we eventually started staying home for Thanksgiving, but I couldn’t tell you at what point we made that change or why. It’s a change I’m aware of, but wasn’t so jarring that the exact point of change is embedded in my mind. There will come a point, just as it did with my grandparents, where my own parents won’t be around to have Thanksgiving with anymore and the same will eventually come to pass with my in-laws and at that point staying home will be more or less a given. Which is also a weird thing to think about. I wonder if Courtney, once she moves out on her own, will make the trip back every year to spend Thanksgiving with us for a few years and carry on the tradition. I wonder if I’ll know how to cook a turkey properly by the time that comes to pass.
I don’t see my older brother or younger sister as much as I’d like to so the holidays have always been one of the few times we get to see each other. My sister’s schedule is very incompatible with my own and the distance between Ann Arbor, where I live, and Pontiac, where she’s living in our childhood neighborhood, is enough to make visiting with any frequency difficult. Of my two siblings I get along with my sister the best, but our lives are so different to each other’s that I often don’t have a clue what to talk to her about. My brother and I get along a lot better than we did as kids, but there are other… stresses… in the relationship between our two families that keeps our contact limited to holidays. And, again, our lives are different enough that I’m never sure what the hell to talk to him about. I actually talk more with his son than I do him because my nephew is a bit of a geek like me.
There are days when I wish my relationship with both my brother and sister could be closer than it is and that sentiment is part of why holidays like Thanksgiving are nice as it’s one of the few days I’m likely to see them. Usually that wishing-we-were-closer feeling is gone by the end of the day as I realize just how little I have to say that either one of them would care much about. I have no idea what the hell we’d do other than sit around and talk anyway as our hobbies are wildly different. Still, not seeing them on Thursday will be a little weird. My parent’s less so because I see them fairly regularly throughout the year.
Not really sure why I decided to write all this down. I don’t really have a point with it other than “it’s kinda weird” which isn’t really a point as much as an observation. But, here you go.
