I love Thanksgiving. There are many things about the holidays that are rough, though. My family holidays are a full-immersion experience, involving late nights of perpetual conversation and overflowing tables of irresistible food, as well as early mornings to watch parades and holiday specials and the like. For all the physical impact of the holidays, though, I love them immensely.
Why? For one thing, they offer a chance to get out and away. As should be clear to anyone who has ever read my column or met me or even been within shouting distance of me over the past two and a bit years, I love this place a lot -- but come on now, people. This is getting a bit much.
There's a reason why our holidays are arranged the way they are. During the long and brilliant hike up the mountain of the year from August to November, the world counts on the exuberance of the beginning to help us through the rough places. By this time, though, the momentum is gone, and we're all pouring out our last reservoirs of fuel. And thus I am thankful for Thanksgiving.
One of my dearest friends insists his Thanksgiving celebration is actually the model used by Hallmark for holiday cards. This may well be, although anyone who's ever really looked at the turkey on those cards may have some doubts about how desirable that is.
My Thanksgiving may not be iconic, but it's pretty kickin'. My family, much like the University, is perpetually bound up in tradition. The night before Thanksgiving, my dad loads the stove with a series of bowls and carefully brews a vat of clam chowder according to his private recipe. While we eat that, I make a ridiculously good coffee cake which is saved for the next morning. Then we wake up, devour my transcendent coffee cake, watch the Macy's Parade and get down to business. My father and all the folks in my generation are responsible for obsessively basting the turkey, rendering it absurdly moist. My aunt spends the day hand-mashing mashed potatoes. My mother creates a magnificent corn pudding. Everyone pitches in on the preposterously good stuffing and the outrageous cranberry sauce and the otherworldly spinach. And then, after dinner, we haul ourselves into the kitchen and crack open an offensive array of pies, as well as another aunt's Platonic ideal of a chocolate cake. I spend a significant portion of the year living in a walking memory of Thanksgiving dinner -- God willing and Jesus tarries (to plagiarize from David Mamet), that memory can give way to fleshy reality come a week today. We all need it. I know I do.
Still, though the food is good and the television is excellent and the football never fails to entertain, there's one true best thing about my family's celebration of the holiday.
When we sit down for Thanksgiving we're each obliged, before we can dive head-first into the abundance before us, to express our thanks for some number of things. It keeps us in touch with each other's fears and dreams, and if it's all about anything, that's it.
So: What am I thankful for? A wonderful question, reader. I am thankful for a resplendent succession of religious zealots who have favored us with their craziness in recent months. I am thankful for the broad spectacle of Pancakes for Parkinson's, particularly for the girls who burst out into startled applause at the incredible flipping talent my partner and I demonstrated. I am thankful for not having mono (fingers crossed). I am thankful for good friends, particularly those who lend me their cars. I am thankful for leaves, dogs and sunsets. I am thankful for sleepless nights. I am thankful for Raising Cane's. I am thankful for people who offer up their homes so those who can't go home have someplace to eat next Thursday night. I am thankful for teachers who speak English and know what a curve is. I am thankful, most of all, for the absolute unflinching perfection that is the University, and for that strange day when I decided to come here.
And I'm thankful for you, my friends, especially those of you who don't read my column -- it's getting weird when people quote me. Have a wonderful and absurdly unhealthy break.
Connor's column runs bi-weekly on Thursdays. He can be reached at sullivan@cavalierdaily.com.
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