Panhandling Philosopher: The Sober Somber Side of Holiday Festivity

The Sober Somber Side of Holiday Festivity

Written by Dan McDonald

In most of the last thirty-five years I have returned home to Illinois to celebrate either Thanksgiving or Christmas with family. We always want holiday festivals to be wonderful and joyous. This year as I went home for Thanksgiving I felt as if holidays are almost meant to be experienced with a sober somber side dish to go with the turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, and the pumpkin pie. I felt heaviness weighing upon me as Thanksgiving drew near.

Part of the heaviness was due to the news coming our way. We were thinking on and sorting out our feelings about events in Paris, Lebanon, and multiple places on the African continent. This year’s crisis was ISIS and other terrorist groups. Others wondered why we weren’t more concerned with white terrorists. We struggled as a nation with what we ought to do regarding the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the Middle East crisis. Jewish leaders, at the Holocaust museum, remembering America turning away desperate Jewish refugees on the eve of the Second World War argued for receiving refugees. Others voiced concerns regarding how terrorists would try to take advantage of the vetting process. While international concerns were dominating this year's focus, the crisis last year which resulted in the Ferguson protests were simmering yet this year. There were continued demonstrations of dissatisfaction with the status quo. We live in a troubled world. But most of us find a table full of food and drink enough of an escape mechanism to allow us to celebrate the good we have known rather than to be preoccupied with the troubles we fear. Perhaps we should consciously take a stand of rejoicing in the good and refusing to bow to fears of evil. We should do so whether motivated by faith in the God or simply responding to evil with an existentialist scream of “Screw you who would bring yet more trouble into our troubled world".

A second consideration which weighed on my mind was the pesky likelihood of tension among family members celebrating Thanksgiving. Maybe we expect too much. Many of us have families with diverse and not always compatible life perspectives. Each year we vaguely promise ourselves we won’t bring up the stuff that enrages the most sensitive souls in our midst. But somehow someone has to get something in that moves another from the point of feeling tension to the triggering of their blast off moment. We try to hide within our families the festival destroying tendencies. Sometimes we imagine other families don’t experience any of our experiences of heated words, upset emotions, and someone leaving the house upset. This year’s festival in our family had very little of this. Maybe we are maturing. But I dwelt on its possibility before we gathered for our celebration. Sometimes it is comforting to know that other families deal with such problems. If your family doesn’t have these problems when you gather; just be thankful. But for me it was comforting when NBC journalist Ali Vitali tweeted in reference to someone else’s moment of tension the words “When you realize you’ve been home for too long.” I’m glad Ali Vitali made her comment on Twitter, because she probably made it easier for some families to realize they weren’t alone facing tension between members of the family during the Thanksgiving celebration.

It maybe shouldn't be a surprising scenario given family dynamics. If you think about it, a family is the one American institution where we celebrate a collective identity. We are family, is the one thing Americans, whether conservative or liberal, believe is an identity that matters as much as an individual’s identity. It is within family that we begin to learn to struggle for that part of ourselves which sets us apart as unique in comparison with other members in our family. It is in protecting our individual uniqueness that we push the envelope to see how much we can press against the family expectations and still find love and acceptance. We learn to assert our individuality in the backdrop of a family that may find some of what we do or think disconcerting, strange, not well thought out, etc. We learn to push the envelope for our identity. Maybe it is to be expected that at family gatherings we will tend at moments to push that envelope once more. But while it may be a part of the family dynamic, it would be reassuring if envelope pushing battles could be contained until after dessert had been served.

The thing though which most weighed me down was I turned sixty years of age a month before Thanksgiving. Sixty years ago I was a baby surrounded by a large extended family at Thanksgiving. Sixty years later, Jacob who is my sister’s third grandson is the new baby at the Thanksgiving feast. The parents who celebrated Thanksgiving when I was born became grandparents and then passed on. The children of my generation grew up and became parents. My oldest brother was the first in my generation of our family to pass on. Increasingly I see chairs around a thanksgiving table that once had other parents and grandparents in them. I imagine ghosts around the family table. That is the way with traditions. The festival is filled with actors and actresses fulfilling their roles in an annual production going through each part as the infant, as the older children, as the newlyweds and then new parents, then watching their children have children so they are grandparents, and eventually they become the ghosts whose stories we tell and whose impact remains in noticed and unnoticed ways around the table. That is I think why this Thanksgiving turned out to be sobering and somber. When the time comes I want the stories about my ghost to be meaningful. I know sometimes I have been a jerk. I know someone will want to be the one who brings the chocolates after I am gone. What else will be remembered about us who are soon to be the ghosts imagined around the festival table – the cloud of witnesses whose memories will hopefully speak caution and occasionally be remembrances of something to cherish and nourish in ourselves. The Psalmist rejoiced that the Lord gave him an abundant table in the midst of enemies. So I will rejoice that we had an abundant table with the backdrop of a few dreary thoughts. So I will close this remembrance of Thanksgiving with some family photographs from the past week.