When the holidays just don’t feel right

The day after Mom’s funeral we celebrated my oldest brother’s birthday with a family trip to the apple orchard. It was the first time Mom hadn’t sung “Happy Birthday” to one of her kids on their birthday (except for the year she forgot Dan’s birthday) and all of us felt her absence profoundly.

Posing for pictures in the orchard, enjoying fresh-baked treats, and watching my nephews climb the trees were welcome diversions from the inescapable truth that milestone moments would never feel the same.

Less than two months later came Thanksgiving, which was one of Mom’s favorites, and the only holiday we celebrated with her extended side of the family.

My dinner that year was a meatball sub ordered from a gas station at a highway exit somewhere in Pennsylvania and eaten in the passenger seat of my girlfriend Jenny’s car.

Halfway through the meal a single meatball plopped out of the sub streaking sauce down my chest and stomach before splattering onto the seat right between my legs leaving a stain on the seat that never came out.

We paused when that meatball splattered wondering whether to laugh or cry. Thankfully, we laughed.

The trip was our return to Connecticut after nearly three years in Texas. Thanksgiving fell between two early winter storms that year and served as our best chance to pass through the mountains between her sister’s house in Louisville, Kentucky, and our new home in Norwalk.

We didn’t know what to do when Christmas came a month later so we improvised going to Christmas Eve services in the church I grew up with, sleeping in a charming local hotel, then having an early Christmas dinner with my dad and stepmom before flying to Nashville (where Jenny’s family lives).

In Nashville, Jenny surprised me with a room at the Opryland Hotel, which goes all out for Christmas. We spent the night walking among the shops and lights, then closed down the Jack Daniels bar.

If you asked me before Mom died to guess what that first Thanksgiving would look like, I never would’ve gone with gas station meatballs eaten in the passenger seat of an idling car. And if you’d asked me to guess what Christmas would look like, I definitely wouldn’t have said dinner and drinks at a high-end Nashville tourist trap.

I also wouldn’t have guessed that both of those holidays would end up standing out in my memories as some of my all-time favorites. Turns out, some of the best holiday celebrations are the ones that don’t feel traditional at all.

It took a long time for holidays to start to feel like holidays again but they definitely were — I’ve got the memories to prove it.

Every year Jenny proposes putting the Christmas tree up before Thanksgiving and every year I immediately dismiss it as absurd. “A Christmas tree,” I’ve always said, “should go up no sooner than the day after Thanksgiving.”

Well, our Christmas tree is already up and we had our Thanksgiving dinner early too on the Sunday before “Thanksgiving.”

We squeezed it in as the grand finale to my mother-in-law’s twoweek-long (COVID test-approved) visit. After years of playfully bickering over these “ironclad traditions,” we both intuitively recognized that freeing ourselves from traditional constraints was necessary this year.

Anecdotal observations and news reports suggest a lot of people feel that way.

The trick to celebrating a holiday that no longer feels like a holiday is to actually celebrate it. Finding something special in the difficult holidays rejuvenates their meaning.

It’s fine to reminisce about past celebrations and natural to speculate on what you’d be doing at that time in said alternate universe (right now Mom and her sister would be staging their whipped cream fight. Remember how she got when it smudged her glasses?) but you’ve got to push forward with whatever you’ve got.

Even when what you’ve got is just a gas station meatball splattered between your legs. Though it may not seem like it at the time, believe me, it’s reason enough to celebrate.

However you choose to celebrate this year, Happy Thanksgiving!

Chris Gaffney writes a weekly humor column at uncommondiscourse.com . He is a stay-at-home dad and former attorney living in Walling ford.