Thanksgiving 2014
Nov. 27th, 2014 20:27![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mapsedgeThis is the second Thanksgiving in a row that I have spent away from home, not with anyone of my family beyond Michelle and the kids. We're in Minneapolis for Oireachtas, which is inexplicably scheduled for Thanksgiving weekend every year. Katie is dancing on a team, and Jami is signed up for only one dance. I wonder if this will be our last regional event. Jami is showing little motivation to dance byond class time, and if you're going to advance you have to "do your homework", as it were. To do it well, it's an expensive sport and you have to treat it like one. The both enjoy the dance, but seem to approach it like a hobby, and I can't drop a thousand bucks every year - and a minimum of $400 for an average feis, four times a year - for a hobby.
So, Thanksgiving, away from home. I have real mixed feelings about it. It's not like I'm very close to my siblings and their families, but I have strong emotions linked to Thxg/Christmas season. Memories of a long dining room table, the special turkey-pilgrim-indian dishes, salt/pepper shakers, relish dishes - all made, I'm quite sure, with a not-food-safe glaze.
Much of my childhood is wrapped up in this season, some of my best and worst memories. It was during a Christmas visit that we began to discover the depth of my father's illness. I remember him standing in the living room looking at my sister, real confusion in his face, saying, "I should know you...I should know who you are..."
I remember the first Thanksgiving we celebrated in Weeping Water, Nebraska after my grandmother died, making the three and a half hour drive so my grandfather wouldn't be alone, filling the house with people, noise, cigarette smoke, and casseroles.
The weekend after Thanksgiving is when the Morris house gets decorated for Christmas. I'm not sure we'll even bother with a tree this year.
I don't enjoy feises. Besides being expensive as hell, they're mind-numbingly tedious. The same accordion or fiddle tune for hours on end, played too loud (really, why not face the speakers toward the dancers and turn the volume down?), so that two thousand dancers can spend ninety seconds each doing basically the same steps as everyone else.
Feeling a little melancholy. Could be that I'm just tired, that's possible, too.
So, Thanksgiving, away from home. I have real mixed feelings about it. It's not like I'm very close to my siblings and their families, but I have strong emotions linked to Thxg/Christmas season. Memories of a long dining room table, the special turkey-pilgrim-indian dishes, salt/pepper shakers, relish dishes - all made, I'm quite sure, with a not-food-safe glaze.
Much of my childhood is wrapped up in this season, some of my best and worst memories. It was during a Christmas visit that we began to discover the depth of my father's illness. I remember him standing in the living room looking at my sister, real confusion in his face, saying, "I should know you...I should know who you are..."
I remember the first Thanksgiving we celebrated in Weeping Water, Nebraska after my grandmother died, making the three and a half hour drive so my grandfather wouldn't be alone, filling the house with people, noise, cigarette smoke, and casseroles.
The weekend after Thanksgiving is when the Morris house gets decorated for Christmas. I'm not sure we'll even bother with a tree this year.
I don't enjoy feises. Besides being expensive as hell, they're mind-numbingly tedious. The same accordion or fiddle tune for hours on end, played too loud (really, why not face the speakers toward the dancers and turn the volume down?), so that two thousand dancers can spend ninety seconds each doing basically the same steps as everyone else.
Feeling a little melancholy. Could be that I'm just tired, that's possible, too.