Happy Thanksliving

Ayla as Princess Mononoke and Indy as Junie B. Jones

Indy has been dreaming that our cat, Whiskey, is turning into a man at night, and that while she sleeps he takes her earrings out of her ears and puts them back in. I am not even going to BEGIN to touch the Freudian implications of that one. At dinner Ayla said that charming anthem of 4th graders everywhere: "whoever smelt it dealt it", to which Indy smartly replied, "Whoever made the rhyme is a bank robber", having mistranslated the usual reply in that swirling, nautilustic brain of hers. I know what you're thinking, but Indy is not a drunk.

While at work yesterday I realized that Thanksgiving is about to happen. I'm feeling melancholy about the holidays this year. Plans to go to Colorado for Christmas (the sound of that so cozy in a 90's sitcom way) fell through, which means we are alone here in Brevard for both of the major winter holidays. As if the holidays weren't already drenched in nostalgia and melancholy enough. I am one of those people who feels sad upon hearing Christmas music chirping in stores or seeing items that aren't normally attached to Christmas dressed up in green and red and carefully arranged in eye-catching displays. A few weeks ago at Barnes and Noble, the sight of Christmas-y tea and shortbread boxes made my heart sink. Not because it was "too soon" or disturbingly capitalistic, I'm long resigned to all that. I don't know exactly why the holidays make me feel low, they just do, and I'm feeling all the lower about spending them here rather than there.

Growing up, my mother always worked frantically to create a beautiful Thanksgiving, and as a teenager I began to implore her to call off all the work, to order Chinese food so that we could just relax together. (It was also as teenagers, I believe, that my sister and I began to call it Thanksliving, not as a paean to 'taking Thanksgiving more into our hearts' but in order to do impressions of drunks) Now as an adult, I'm perfectly happy to order take-out, but of course my daughters want the full traditional spread. So last night, Noah and Ayla and I stood in the kitchen and made a list (Indy was off somewhere hallucinating) and sometime this weekend I will shop for turkey and cranberries, either in the dead of night or by the first rays of dawn, like some poor translation of a pagan ritual, designed now in modernity not to appease the fitful gods but to avoid the wealthy retirees, who in Brevard are legion. I don't like Thanksliving food, any of it, except this horrendously wonderful, uh, thing, from Noah's side of the family that involves beating Velveeta with sugar, slabbing it on top of apple pie filling, and pouring condensed milk over the whole affair. It is nothing short of an abomination, which pleases me like Krampus does during this saccharine, canned-joy time.