Last Thanksgiving, instead of lounging around all day with family and cooking, I was participating in a makeshift holiday experience with a bunch of expat teachers in Thailand. We listened to some old school hip-hop, ate food that was considered luxurious in the land of pad thai, and reminisced about family traditions and customs that we were missing as we celebrated the holiday on the other side of the world. It was a very American holiday celebration, though we included Brits, Aussies, and Europeans alike, in our festivities...hey, any reason to bring people together, right? The funny thing is that Thais don't really understand Thanksgiving and though I tried my best to make it sound like a meaningful holiday, I made it sound more like - I don't give a fuck about Thanksgiving. That is a link to a post I wrote last year, where I attempted to tell the story of Thanksgiving like I did for my Thai students. I really tried, but I was teaching a class at the time that was focusing on European colonization of the Americas, so my students didn't quite understand how Europeans had really been all that thankful...my students had a lot of questions.
There seems to be a lot of pressure around holidays, but this year, I cooked my favorite foods with my sister, watched numerous episodes of Walking Dead (enough to prepare me for any zombie apocalypse), did some old lady activities like crocheting, and enjoyed the food coma of a day, as it was exactly the way I wanted it to be.
This year, I'm thankful for time. I'm thankful that I'm in America, though longer than I ever planned to be - since I should probably be in Korea right now, and that I've had the chance to be with family. With this borrowed time, I've even had the chance to add to my family in this place and that makes me thankful every day. I guess what I feel grateful for is the fact that this world does move quickly and since my lifestyle is so transitory, at the present, I feel like I'm in a cracked out version of the real world. My relationships feel even less permanent than this impermanent world has already made them, my life feels sped up, and unpredictable, so that when I do spend time with those I love, I sometimes feel the pressure of time sitting on my shoulder.
Having holidays, like Thanksgiving, might be bullshit in nature, but the idea of having one day where everyone in the country is on the same page, is something that I can get behind. I like the idea of all of us taking the time to prioritize being with friends and family, because in this crazy and mixed up world, time isn't always on our side. We have to seize the opportunities while they are available to us, go down the rabbit hole in new relationships, and be open to love, because we can't always count on time to stick around. Turkeys and cranberry sauce aside, this year, I remembered that though families can be big or small, and traditions/customs applied and refitted to meet different settings and locations, the stuff that matters is taking a moment to be thankful for the time we have with those who we have the chance to share it with. It was just one year ago that I was missing this place and wanting to be around New Mexico for the holidays, eating green chili mashed potatoes, and thinking about those that I love. Now, I'm here, and well, here's to the holidays.
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