When Charley and I are asked what we’re doing for Thanksgiving and we tell them we’re staying home, just the two of us, people gasp and go silent.
I know they’re thinking how sad that we’ll be alone, and some of them are wondering if they should invite us to join the crowd they’ve invited to their home.
The truth is, my husband and I are thrilled to celebrate the holiday alone.
Charley and I have been married for thirty-eight years, and we live on Nantucket, and everyone wants to come to Nantucket, even in November. I mean, President Biden comes here for Thanksgiving. We’ve had relatives, friends, relatives’ children, relatives’ children’s friends, friends and their children, children and their friends, children and their children, friends of relatives’ friends, and occasionally a dog to our house for Thanksgiving.
I have polished silver, brought out my mother-in-law’s best china (a wedding present to us), covered the dining room table with my grandmother’s lace tablecloth, and produced gravy without lumps.
Charley has chauffeured people to and from the airport and the ferries, carried in several tons of groceries, helped me put the leaves into his grandfather’s table, carved the turkey, and remained polite to anyone joining us, even our own children.
A month or so later, we had repeated it all for Christmas. As the years passed and we all got older, things changed. Charley’s mother insisted that he and our son Josh wear blazers to the table. Our table at our house. Our son Josh came into the dining room wearing a blazer and one of my most flamboyant rhinestone earrings. At one Christmas dinner, our daughter’s boyfriend played his guitar and sang a song he’d composed about losing his virginity to our daughter. This is true.
But this Thanksgiving, Charley and I can read books, watch television, go for a long walk on the moors, and yes, take a nap. Furthermore, we are having a leg of lamb, and I won’t have to succumb to the first-world guilt of not stripping the meat off the turkey after the meal, using it in creative recipes for the next week, or simmering the carcass in a huge pot to make turkey stock. We’re having store-made pecan pie instead of my pumpkin pie, and Reddi-Wip instead of my whipped cream.
Best of all, I won’t end the day by hating everyone who sat in the living room while I cleaned the kitchen. We’ll Face-Time with our grandchildren and chat with our children, assuring them we do not feel lonely. Charley will look at maps of the Tian Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan and the endorheic lake Issyk-Kul and I’ll read an old Agatha Christie, one of the many in which all the relatives are suspected of murder.
We’re going to our daughter’s and her family on the mainland for Christmas. They have five children, ages two to sixteen. We will be SO thankful for them and for our restful Thanksgiving holiday.