Thanksgiving Redux

This Thanksgiving I watched my family fill an empty house. My wife and I have seen our small pack of children slowly move away to colleges and boyfriends houses along with more mature after school activities and weekend getaways, and most of the day now we walk from empty room to empty room, encountering no one but each other. So when my children, mother, brother, in-laws and extended family started to trickle into our house this Thanksgiving, the place felt full again. And it felt good. Like a home.

But, strangely, it also felt quiet. There were the noises of children whining and giggling and knocking over delicate objects, the sounds of adults stacking dishware and calling across rooms to get the correct number of chairs correctly placed at the table, the venerable hum of humans laughing and those few serious heartbreaking conversations about irresolvable family concerns. And yet somehow the house seemed controlled and settled, polite and nicely evolved. Looked at from a different angle you might also say that it was tepid and at times just a little boring.

I couldn’t help thinking about how much blood had been drained from Thanksgiving since I was a kid. My home now is infinitely larger than the railroad-roomed, one bath, inner city boxes in which I grew up, but when we fill it with people for the holidays what goes on is a mere blip on the holiday Richter scale compared to what it was like growing up in a place where the holidays were a time when people yelled and fought and laughed and drank until they passed out. A time gone by where eating was a sport and where we loved so hard that by the end of the day we were all panting in neutral corners.

On those Thanksgivings back then it was expected that the men would play the children - the clowns - and that the children would behave like full grow midget men and women. And the women … well the women were the queens. They controlled the flow of the cooking and food; they told those ridiculous guys where to sit and when to shut up; they threw the kids morsels of food before the plates reached the table and they hit these selfsame offspring with slaps and shrill voices if they started to act too much like those overgrown children whom they had married. All this would go on through the dinner and into the desert, until we were all sated with food and wine and after dinner sweets and then, if we were very lucky, all hell would break loose.

I can still see it clearly forty or fifty years later. It could be any one of a dozen different scenes, all interchangeable, but in this particular Thanksgiving set piece, my grandmother, mother, aunts and various other women relatives are cleaning the table while that group of scheming, clownish men – my grandfather, father, uncles, great uncles and second cousins – are entering the living rooms with their hands full of whiskey tumblers and their minds full of dirty jokes and exaggerated stories that they are going to tell each other. We children are nowhere to be seen, but that is only because we are doing some scheming of our own.

Camped out in an alcove behind a door, just off the living room where no one can see us, are my cousins and I. When that half drunk crowd of male relatives enters the living room, my youngest boy cousin (the one with a pair as big as all outdoors) jumps out and startles my grandfather who spills his tumbler of Canadian Club all over my uncle’s rayon sweater wherein both of the men start to chase the boy back into the dining room and around and around the large table. The rest of us children are given threatening looks by our fathers, but that does not stop us from also running into the dining room to crouch next to the little cabinet where my grandparents keep the liquor. From this vantage point we can watch the chase, and as we do we laugh so hard that snot begins running from of our noses.

In the kitchen the women have heard the commotion and have entered the dining room where they quickly comprehend that my grandfather and uncle will never be able to catch my sinewy jackrabbit of a cousin. My grandmother, who will not put up with nonsense from any boy or man, slips off her shoe and with this killer mule in her right hand, she joins the chase. Before you can say Bugs Bunny my grandmother traps my cousin in a far corner of the dining room, whereby she swats him twice across the back of his head with the sole of her shoe, basically putting an end to this portion of our entertainment.

There will be more of this kind of thing before the end of the day: heated, obscenity-laced arguments that will break out over the card game the adults will play; one cousin locking another out of the house until the exiled one breaks a window trying to get back in: one of the more recently married women sobbing hysterically to her mother because her husband has spoken crudely to her (as if he had ever spoken to her any other way). But for now, the men in the family have all recommenced their migration to the living room, where soon the snoring will be accompanied by the muted sounds of a lowly moaning TV set. The women too are subdued for the moment as they gossip softly and inhale the menthol cigarettes they have lit up now that their husbands are asleep. These women are slowly gassing us children with second-hand smoke as we hide not far from them on the kitchen stairs. But that’s okay, because what we children are doing on those stairs is simply plotting our next attack.

Am I crazy to miss this sort of Thanksgiving tumult - this holiday hullabaloo that was part of every Thanksgivings, Christmas and Easter of my childhood? Perhaps I am. At our house this Thanksgiving the men worked in concert with the women; we helped with the cooking and the setting and the clearing of the table, and if we weren’t doing that we kept the children quiet by playing with them or by reminding them to use their “indoor voices.” It was a picture of moderation where no one ate or drank too much; where we maintained level heads and monitored ourselves to ensure we were the lovely, heartwarming family we had always wanted to become. And while it’s true that nobody got hurt or punished or even swatted with a shoe at my house this past Thanksgiving, I secretly longed for that tiny bit of danger that comes from never really knowing what a truly irrational family might do next.

So here’s to the grandparents and mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and cousins of Thanksgivings past who kept us guessing and on our toes, the clowns and queens who loved us too loudly and yelled too frequently, who napped while the wives cooked and cleaned, and who ate and drank and kept secrets while their children played and plotted and practiced at being midget adults.

Four days ago I watch my family fill our empty house for Thanksgiving, but somehow it didn’t feel quite as full as it used to. How could it? The clowns and midgets and queens have now all disappeared.