A Brief But By No Means Comprehensive List of My Most Awful Thanksgivings

Which I offer to you in the spirit of the holidays.

Not a photo of the author, but you get where I’m going with this.

Some people do the holidays with all the stylistic aplomb of a pre-incarcerated Martha Stewart. I am not one of those people. With me, it’s scorched turkeys, drunk neighbors, and 911 calls. Presents that look as though I wrapped them with my feet. Ex-boyfriends showing up on my doorstep. Good intentions gone completely off the rails.

My first Thanksgiving away from home was spent in Washington, D.C.

D.C. was a strange place back in the nineties. It’s likely still strange. Austere, official, not big on the warm fuzzies. Sort of like living inside a John le Carré novel. The day before Thanksgiving, I sat in a diner with a friend of mine who had also recently moved to D.C. We were glumly drinking coffee, homesick but not willing to admit it. In a fit of clueless youthful idealism, I said, “We should make sack lunches for Thanksgiving and hand them out to the homeless.”

We gathered what ingredients we could afford: oatmeal bread, peanut butter and jelly, snack-sized bags of Lay’s potato chips, Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies, Welch’s juice boxes. We made sandwiches and put everything in brown paper bags. Burning with do-gooder earnestness, we reminded each other that plenty of homeless folk couldn’t or wouldn’t go to shelters, which was why the meals we were providing were so important. I’d read somewhere that performing acts of service for others when you’re depressed was the key to feeling better, so both of us were all in.

On a brisk, blue-skied Thanksgiving morning, we headed out with our sack lunches, distributing them amongst the legions of homeless men sleeping on grates (for the unconscious, we tenderly set the bag alongside them so they would see it first thing when they woke up.)

Some of the men joked with us. “What’s this, gal?” one of them asked, peering inside the bag. “Don’t you got a steak for me? What the hell am I gonna do with a sandwich?” Some of the men didn’t. When we were down to our last bag, I eagerly looked around for a likely candidate and spotted one on a bench. He fit my idea of what a homeless guy looked like—slumped down in a threadbare coat, boots unpolished, ugly over-stretched Charlie Brown sweater.

I went over and handed him a bag. “Happy Thanksgiving,” I said.

“What’s this?” he asked in a posh British accent.

The accent threw me. I didn’t know any homeless people with British accents. Still, I didn’t want to fall prey to any ugly stereotypes, so I said, “It’s for you. In case you get hungry.”

He gave me an odd smile and nodded politely. But as I turned to go, a silver Mercedes pulled up. The man got inside and drove away, cradling the bag on his lap.

When you’re young and lacking in life experience, you tend to fill in the blanks with what you’ve seen on TV or read in books. To me, any man who dressed like that was surely homeless. Only when you get older do you realize that homeless people don’t dress a particular way. They don’t all look hangdog. Hell, some of them drive a Mercedes. The difference is, they sleep in their Mercedes because life really is that capricious and cruel.

Then there was the Thanksgiving I nearly set my apartment complex ablaze. My kids, both teenagers, wanted me to bake cookies, so I fired up the oven.

#mood

A month before, my daughter had brought home this big gelatinous ball with jiggly spikes on it. It looked like a coronavirus, if coronaviruses were a sickly, fluorescent green. Her brother kept playing with it, pinching off the spikes and leaving them everywhere, so in an attempt to save my vacuum, which kept jamming, I stuck the ball in the oven and forgot about it.

Now, clouds of toxic black smoke were pouring out of my kitchen.

I smelled the smoke before I saw it. Yelling to my kids to open all the doors and windows, I turned off the oven and tried prying a nearby fire extinguisher out of its wall bracket. It wouldn’t budge. I tried again, convinced that spraying fire extinguisher chemicals on top of whatever chemicals were already filling my kitchen would surely create a fireball and kill everyone. In one last desperate heave, I yanked the fire extinguisher and a huge chunk of the wall came with it. That’s what sixteen hours a week in the gym will get you. I pulled the containment pin and sprayed the black, charred mess dripping from my oven rack.

At this point, most of the neighbors had gathered outside to see what was going on—or watch us die. Both of our indoor kitties had fled in terror and were being chased around the pool by the neighbor kids. I started laughing so hard, I couldn’t stop. Amid the stench of burnt phthalates, bisphenols, and fluorinated compounds, I looked at my ruined kitchen, my kids’ bewildered faces, my baffled Korean neighbors, and accepted, deep in my heart, that life was ridiculous and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Except laugh.

Olive’s not-too-subtle suggestion to stop writing today’s Cappuccino and make with the pets and the cuddling already.

About seven years before our toxic fireball Thanksgiving, I had one of those truly awful Thanksgivings dreaded by single parents everywhere: the off-year when, per your court-ordered custody agreement, your kids are with your ex. Those are the cruelest holidays. To make matters worse, I was dating the kind of bad news guy a woman tends to date when she’s recently been living in a marital Sahara.

Its name was Todd.

We were at his sister’s house, me and Todd. He made a big deal about bringing me to meet his family because I had refused point blank to introduce him to my kids.

Todd was the equivalent of “Mommy water,” the stuff you don’t let your kids anywhere near. I knew that. We had a tortured and mutually obsessive relationship that must have been as hard to watch as it was awful to be in. That didn’t keep him from sleazing around though. Nothing did.

His phone started beeping around 2AM. He was passed out on the couch. I sat reading next to him, missing my kids, hating my life. Hating everyone, really. The text tone on his phone kept chirping away, but nothing in this world or the next was going to wake Todd after all that food and booze. So I reached over to see who it was.

In the interests of decency, I won’t tell you what I saw on that phone, but let me say it wasn’t anything you could pass around at church. There were photos. At first I thought I was looking at a sick wet tree. I started screaming at Todd to wake up, which he did, wild-eyed. I screamed at him all the way back to my apartment. Then I screamed at him on the phone. Not my best moment. And it wasn’t even Todd I was mad at. It was me for getting involved with him, especially since I knew exactly who and what he was. He’s the ex who showed up years later on my doorstep, possibly drunk and deeply apologetic. We had a brief chat before I sent him on his way. No hard feelings. You can’t get mad at a dog for wagging its tail.

John and I were laughing tonight about the truly stupid things (and people) we did years ago. All that managed to do was make me appreciate my life now. At the time, I had no idea what a healthy relationship was supposed to look like or feel like because I’d never had one. But once you’ve actually experienced a loving, mutually respectful relationship, you will never settle for anything less.

If Thanksgiving is the season of gratitude, then my gratitude is for just this: the good memories and the bad, times that were meant for my growth and also for my correction. Enough distance has passed for me to look back with loving kindness on the mistakes I made. Most, but perhaps not all of us are doing our best under trying circumstances. It’s easy to lose sight of that when we’re in the thick of it during the holidays, but perspective is always the better part of wisdom.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. May we continue to bumble our way through life, occasionally setting fire to things, then putting out the fire, and then laughing like the fools we are.

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin

Do you have fun Thanksgiving stories? Be sure to leave them in the comments section below.