The American tradition of the dysfunctional family fighting and crying during the holiday season has become a quintessential comedic stereotype in TV and movies, one that plays out, usually, with a happy ending when everyone learns the true reason for the season; in reality, however, it typically reaches a boiling point when your parents ask you—hypothetically, of course—who would you want to live with if they were to get divorced.
At least that’s how it played out for me when I was around 8 years old or so.
The Thanksgiving holidays have really never meant much to me, so I admit I do tend to exude a snobbish aura of Indigenous grandeur about myself on that day; I like to think that I can see through all of the commercialized colonial bullshit that most people have come to worship when, in reality, I’m probably just heavily masking the intense heartache and dark feelings that the bedeviled loneliness brings this time each year.
With such a gold-plated attitude, I’m usually never invited to people’s houses for Thanksgiving dinner but, still, they’re usually kind enough to take pity on me and drop a plate off at my house; it’s the best that I can really ask for these days, I suppose. The sound of a microwave dinging that my meal is suitably reheated has become my recent yearly tradition, one that will probably go on for years to come.