I am not really a big fan of Thanksgiving.  There are a lot of expectations for the holiday.  For the longest time every year was a battle.  My parent's house or your's.  My grandma's house or your aunt's house.  Make your choice and piss off the rest.  The only other alternative is 4 Thanksgiving dinners which is nowhere near as much fun as it sounds.  We even tried splitting off on the holiday going our own ways and ended up miserable.  When my husband started working a job where he was on call 365 days a year things got even more complicated.  We would have no idea until the morning of Thanksgiving if he will even be in the state.  But when my father-in-law passed away suddenly and unexpectedly several years ago we stopped caring about going anywhere.

My mother-in-law didn't want a celebration.  But it didn't feel right leaving her alone.  Sweet and loving family members made special efforts to invite us.  We tried going as a trio.  But it felt like we were intruding on someone else's tradition.  It highlighted our loss rather than covered it up.  There were more than a few Thanksgivings that passed where we all just sat in our individual homes and ignored that this day was any different than the rest.

And then I met Jane.  Jane lost her husband about the same time as we lost dad.  She knew what we were going through first hand.  Jane started joining us every time we went anywhere.  We had sewn her into the patchwork of our family.  So when Thanksgiving rolls around, it wouldn't have been the same without her.  So when we realized my husband would be gone on Thanksgiving this year and Jane had other plans, we postponed dinner until Friday so we could all be together.

This Thanksgiving was the first Thanksgiving in a long line of years where Thanksgiving felt like a holiday.  It felt complete and joyful.  And we laughed.  We laughed so much.  We stuffed ourselves and camped out under the soft glow of the flat screen watching Animal Planet, and trying to lure mom's cat into our laps with bits of turkey.  And after dinner we pulled out our favorite punching bag, the collected love poems of Danielle Steel.  We recited them beat-style with Putamayo's South Africa stylings humming in the background.  We laughed until we cried.  And then we started our first ever annual Thanksgiving tradition.  We all put pen to paper and wrote our own soggy-saccharine love anthems and recited them to each other until tears of laughter ran down our faces and the pumpkin pie was spent.