When it comes to holidays, my family doesn’t have many traditions. In general we keep it pretty low-key, maybe making an appearance at a barbeque or a dinner party and then calling it a day. Our decorating is usually limited to whatever we can scrounge up from the basement, and we don’t even buy Halloween candy. We’ve never come close to taking a professional Christmas card photo—it usually ends up being whichever halfway decent picture of my brother and me we can find from earlier in the year. None of us get super into holidays, and there’s no intensive planning and entertaining. On the whole, we keep things pretty simple in the Ducharme household.
On the surface, it seems like our Thanksgiving celebration is the epitome of our tradition-light holiday style. Thanksgiving is practically synonymous with family; it’s a day to be around those who you value and love. Some people who aren’t close with their extended families spend the holiday together, even if that means more bickering and politically incorrect comments than anyone should have to endure.
My family is an exception to that rule. I can’t remember the last time we had Thanksgiving with our relatives, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find we never have. I can’t even remember having Thanksgiving in my own home. Instead, armed with pies and stuffed mushrooms, we head down the road and crash our neighbor’s dinner every year.
And it’s not just us – their Thanksgiving is a strange, eclectic mix of people, some who are there year after year and some who just stop by out of the blue. Since we started going when I was in elementary school, everyone from college friends who live too far away to go home for break, to significant others, to other orphaned families have ended up around the very crowded dinner table. It’s not traditional, but it’s our tradition.
I do occasionally wonder if spending Thanksgiving with family would make me see the holiday less as a socially acceptable reason to be gluttonous and more as a time for, you know, giving thanks. Those thoughts are overshadowed, though, by the overwhelming feeling that I wouldn’t trade my Thanksgiving tradition for the world. Over the years, the rag tag bunch that gathers for South Road Thanksgiving has become a family of sorts. There’s plenty of laughter, plenty of wine, plenty of the obligatory Thanksgiving football and plenty of embarrassing stories, just like everyone else’s dinner. Just because the people I share my meal with aren’t blood relatives doesn’t mean I don’t love them like they are.
Corny as it may be, family – and tradition – is what you make of it. The things I treasure most about the holidays aren’t always the traditional Kodak moments. I always smile, for example, when I think about the Easter when my family played poker after brunch, or the utter failure that was our attempt at Christmas charades or the time my brother and I watched “A Christmas Story” back-to-back-to-back.
And this year, my roommates and I started what will hopefully become our own tradition by hosting Friendsgiving at our apartment. Each of our friends brought a dish, we made our tiny university-issued dinner table look as fancy as possible, and we feasted. Even though it wasn’t a real holiday spent with real family, it felt as comfortable and familiar as if it had been.
In the end, the traditions you make yourself, and the traditions that aren’t classic, are the best. I look forward to my strange little Thanksgiving every year, and I can’t wait to do Friendsgiving round two next year. In the end, that’s what holidays should be about.
-Jamie Ducharme can be reached at [email protected]
