I feel like this: the spirit of Thanksgiving isn’t brought about in a day, but rather through a season. When, really, it should be a spirit we keep throughout the year it is something that is at least always close at heart throughout this time of the year.
If you’ve ever sat around the table and played the “I’m Thankful For …” game you know there are a lot of things that folks choose. Throughout the season, based on how the holidays fall and where I’ve always lived and all of the travel and the various things that go with it, I’m thankful for one thing more than others. Truth be told, I’m probably not as thankful as much as I should be. I probably let the inner-Grinch run roughshod over my sentimental gratefulness too much, at the expensive of my gratitude.
And the thing I’m most thankful, and most grateful, for are the people who’ve come into my life when they didn’t have to, and let me take up a little piece of theirs. We pick our friends, we inherit our families, but we’re absorbed and adopted and accepted by others and that’s just a remarkable condition of humanity.
My family is full of stories like that, a family tree with swirls that shouldn’t be that, over time, make perfect sense. So is yours. People marry in and you come to see them as your own. People that need an extra sibling or a grandparent or whatever they need, and you find a place for them in your own family puzzle. This is a neat, and powerful thing.
A few years ago, for just one example, some friends of mine lost their newborn grandchild just before the holidays. Circumstances meant these two lovely people would have been alone at Thanksgiving. I invited them to my grandparents’ home and they sat with us and joked with us and cried with us like old relatives we’d known forever. It had this ease and casualness and lack of formality or awkwardness that was a marvel. It was one of the most wonderful things I’ve seen in a lifetime of memories at my grandparents’ home.
I’m sure my grandmother sent them home with leftovers, which is also what she does.
I was thinking about that sort of thing, how rich I have been in extra-family, on the drive from Connecticut to New Jersey, where I get to be on the “adopted” side of things. This last Christmas gathering is with The Yankee’s godparents. The families are intertwined in unbelievable ways. My father-in-law and The Yankee’s godfather, a retired teacher and coach who tells great stories, have known each other literally almost all of their lives. My mother-in-law and The Yankee’s godmother, a nurse fully intent on exercising her right to spoil her granddaughters, went to nursing school together.
The two families raised their three girls, only about four years apart, between them. Everyone is all grown up now, of course. The younger godsister, if you will, went to college and married the guy she dated there. The older godsister went to the same college and she and her husband have two children — ages two to five or so, who both already speak two or three languages. All of these people are lovely folks.
They’ve all taken us in, the three guys who married into this family — a biotech sales rep, a bike racer/budding film producer and little old me — with the greatest of ease. And I know this happens everywhere and is not unusual in the slightest, but it is, to me, the most amazing thing, about how families operate.
As gifts I received a beautiful ornament and a really nice shirt and sweater. I’m going to take my godmother-in-law clothes shopping with me. She knows her stuff.
Did I really this entire passage just so I could write the phrase godmother-in-law? Yes.
Even the dog gets presents:
That present that the dog opened was from my mother-in-law, who is among the world’s better present givers. (She’s mine and you can’t have her.)
Also, because my godfather-in-law’s father was there tonight, we had scratch-lasagna with four generations of a family tonight. Four generations! (The second time I’ve done that in a week, since there were four generations at one of my family dinners.) How incredible, and it is something we seldom even think about.
The only downside to this day of travel and festivity is riding on some of the bumpier roads on the eastern seaboard. Small price to pay when you have a lot of things for which to be thankful.
