Turkey, Stuffing, Drrrrrrrama! Home For The Holidays And All Those Smoldering Resentments
He's not the only one getting carved up...Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Admit it, the very thought of heading home for Thanksgiving — let alone Christmas or Hanukah — fills some of us, perhaps many of us, with utter freaking dread. Dread!
I’ve spent the past two days talking two dear friends, both women, one with a father-in-law from hell, one with a Dad-from-hell, off the window ledge. As someone who’s also fled her own family, even on Christmas Day itself, once driving like a bat out of hell to rural Pennsylvania where a dear friend’s family took me in, I get it. I’ve already arranged for one of these women to come to our own dysfunctional little menage for Christmas dinner so she can flee her Dad’s drumbeat of criticism. This is a woman who’s gorgeous, brilliant, kind and lectures to academic conferences all over the world. Her fatal flaw? No husband.
Even poor old Bailey on “Grey’s Anatomy” last night got lambasted — at the Thanksgiving dinner table yet — by her own Dad.
Gotta love the holidays. All regression, all the time! Because I’m Canadian and my sweetie’s family lives far away and we’re not that close, we head to friends’ homes each year for Thanksgiving.
We’re thinking of starting a new business, being mid-career journos in a dying field as it is. Rent-A-Guest. Seriously! We’ve got terrific stories: flying on Air Force One, meeting the Queen, dancing with Nureyev — and, most important, we’re really distracting! Want to cut off those pesky, predictable and inevitable questions: “when are you guys finally having kids/getting a new house/job/boyfriend/girlfriend/losing weight”? Make sure you’ve got a few funny, anecdote-laden pals with no emotional ties to anyone at the table. Think of us as your psychic sponges.
Here’s a funny, too-true piece from The New York Times about how hellish the holidays can be. Think it hit a nerve? Oh, yeah — the Times cut off comments after 162 people weighed in. In less than two days.
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Here’s ny solution: volunteer at a dinner feeding the homeless (or any worthy cause.) Your friends then perceive you as so righteous they invite you to their house — where you can tell those stories without even having to clean up the house and cook. Works every time. Happy Thanksgiving!
My theory is that almost any food I don’t have to prepare, cook or clean up after tastes 30 percent better.