Thanksgiving, 2012

Another Thanksgiving is just a few days away - I get my usual share of invitations and turn them down as gracefully as possible, thankful for the offers and not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings, but anxious to sleep late and spend a peaceful, solitary day with my animals and maybe a memory or three.

Even after all these years, I'm no fan of family and  certainly not one of family holidays.  As a child, they were to be endured if not feared and as an adult - in the suffocating embrace of a supposedly intact and openly loving family - I thought I might be strangled.   In hindsight, both extremes seemed as equally unhealthy as they were different.  In one, I tried to manage and deny the emotions. In the other, I tried to copy and manufacture them.  I've found it's far easier on my peace of mind to have to do neither.  Truth is, that without my camera to shield me, even a small crowd gets on my nerves and makes me want to seek a quiet and out of the way corner.  After an initial smile and hug, I'd rather not be noticed at all.  When a friend recently told me that what she liked most about my photographing her was not being aware I was even there, I took it as high praise.

There's something to be said for family traditions, I suppose, but honoring and keeping them alive when you'd rather be somewhere (anywhere!) else is hypocrisy.  So while I thank everyone who so kindly invited me into their homes, I'll keep to my own traditions - sleeping in with the little ones and enjoying a day off to myself, a day when I don't have to follow a routine or even get dressed and have to leave home.

It won't be the day I remember at my grandmother's with the white linened table set for nine and tiny sherry glasses of apple or tomato juice at each setting.  

It won't be the elegant restaurants where we went when she was too old and too weary to cook.

It won't be the sunny and exquisitely formal dining room with my first husband's family, all silver candlesticks and servants gliding in and out from the kitchen.

It won't be the shaky card tables at my mother's lake front cottage with store bought everything.

But it will be mine.

And just as as afterthought......as needless as it is, I can't help but be a little grateful for the primal if slightly comical urge that my married friends have to worry over and feed single women on these kind of holidays.   That at least is a tradition I can accept.