Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

Crap. It is Sunday at 8:30 and I haven’t posted yet. I cannot break my #NaBloPoMo streak on day ten. And you don’t want to read yet another post about cats so soon, I’m sure.

My favorite week of the year is Thanksgiving week. Don’t get me wrong, I am aware of the horrors of Thanksgiving’s history and contemporary manifestations of American imperialism and colonialism. I am using my white privilege to pluck it out of that context, give it a good decolonizing shake, and reclaim it for me. What fucking bullshit.

Stay with me.

It is my favorite week because it is/was a shortened school/work week. It had an ‘eve” that could be self-defined. The traditional meal is delicious, my favorite meal. Some great traditions like Charlie Brown, the Macy’s parade, and my beloved Celebrate the Seasons parade. RIP, Celebrate the Seasons. Leftovers. An extra day off on Friday. And bam, Christmas which I do observe along with other winter holidays.

No gifts. Just food.

As a kid, holidays like this could be treacherous, depending on alcohol consumption and mental health status. So I focused on the food. If we ate at home, a relative’s house, a restaurant – I could rely on the fundamentals of turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes. Everything else could be chaos, all the things I couldn’t control.

The meal still appeared even if some of it had to be scraped off the wall. The meal still appeared even if it was in a aluminum tray in front of the tv. The meal still appeared even drenched in tears of regret, self-loathing, and generational trauma. The meal still appeared.

It might be 15 minutes, it might be all day, but the meal was a bright spot. Sometimes I got lucky and curled up to watch ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ after eating whilst the family shenanigans and descent into drunken stupors took place around me. Other years, I brought a book and sought refuse in any empty room. Once I had to work the evening shift so I got to take my meal to-go.

I’ve never been a Black Friday shopper so that’s never been appealing. The protests over adult children working on Thanksgiving smacks far too much of trad-wife/capitalism sentimentality. But I grew up in a blue collar family where my Dad and other relatives worked a lot of holidays. They didn’t call off because that put an unfair burden on someone else. Steel workers, bus drivers, retail, and yes food service. Hospitality and media. People worked on holidays to keep the world spinning. They always have. The cows gotta be milked, the car accident injuries addressed, and the morning edition of the Friday paper put to bed. Someone was on the air at the local radio stations. Same with TV.

This was the world of my childhood and young adult experiences so I expected nothing else when I grew into the workforce. I am especially suspicious of corporations that want credit for remaining closed on Thanksgiving, but open at 3 AM on Friday. And take television ads out to show how pro-worker they were. Fucking bullshit.

Pay good wages and provide benefits and a safe working environment and Thanksgiving shifts will take care of themselves. Pay minimum wage, no benefits, and ridiculous hours with stampeding herds of customers and lull us into a narrative about family values. Yeah. Fucking bullshit.

I hate when the menu shifts. One year my mother-in-law suggested cherry pie instead of pumpkin and I thought she was insane. I was new to the family dynamic. Another year, I was in grad school in Baton Rouge when a friend turned up with a frozen goose and boiled potatoes. Jesus take the ladle. Then my favorite cafe began fancifying the gravy with bits of pepper and other very unThanksgiving like touches. wtf?

Admittedly, I’m not a fan of cranberry sauce. And I’m fairly certain my aunt was possessed the year she forced us to endure a first course of tomato soup while the turkey languished in the other room. She didn’t even offer a substitute, just expected me to sit there glowering at the slow slurpers. Nonetheless, it was tomato soup every year until her spoon hit the plate, unleashing a stampede of hungry kids rushing to get to the buffet first. I always started on the wrong end so there was no line.

We didn’t pray. We didn’t sing ‘Tis a Gift’ or have little turkey name places. We got into extended arguments about politics. We didn’t really express much in the way of thanks except to the cook and whomever did the dishes. Sort of. We never did charitable works. Or go to Mass. Or talk about pilgrims. It was a thoroughly modern mid to late-twentieth century holiday. The meal. Football. Prepping the hunting gear (not me.)

It was the meal that made the holiday. And I would gladly sacrifice that meal and my culinary lust to undo any single atrocity inflicted in the name of a fake family holiday. Of course I would. Would you?

Thanksgiving is a day to remember genocide white Europeans inflicted on the Indigenous peoples of these United States. And the significant ways us white European-descendants continue to do so. Keeping us navel gazing around labor issues, football rivalries, and ‘jokes’ about the creepy old men in the family is just another ruse by corporate titans to keep us malleable and meek so we don’t question our complicity and victimization in that oppression.

This year, I’ll be with my nephews and their family. Muffins while we watch the parade, appetizers during the dog show and then tofurkey for everyone. I’ll try to sneak in a viewing of Die Hard to launch the Xmas season, but will be outvoted for some esoteric incarnation of the Star Wars galaxy on Disney+. Nephews after all.

How do we reconcile all of this? I don’t have any concrete answers. I’m still dealing with the horrific fallout of the creepy old men/monsters/cult leaders in my family to be able to articulate a coherent resistance to colonialism. Clinging to the one constant that made so many other days bearable is simply a survival mechanism.

I see a distinct line from the concealment of the real events of the invasion of the Americas to the denial of sexual predators in families, even to the self-imposed delusion that a craft store values prioritize a holiday over hourly wages. Thanksgiving is about excess and denial.

My favorite week of the year was a form of subsistence I carved from small pieces of joy that littered a bleak existence. It got me through 54 years so while I say ‘fucking bullshit’ to most of it, I still celebrate the week I created for myself. So here’s my ode to Thanksgiving meals. Fucking bullshit.

“As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly“