Thanksgiving and Other Holidays

Thanksgiving Day.

The cold kiss of late November

The smell of earth and rain

Unity with a cycle again, an alignment of memories of this day

Yet somehow I feel disconnected from the social fabric of “celebration.”

Days that are supposed to be celebratory "here" never feel that way for me. Thanksgiving and Christmas in the northern hemisphere was like an addendum to my cognitive development.

Even as an “American” that has been to a number of Thanksgiving celebrations, I have no cultural tie or any feeling of resonance with this “holiday.” I’m always left with a feeling of not feeling “what I’m supposed to feel” on this day. I just don’t feel anything but lethargic and full. As I grew older, I was more struck by the colonial history of the day more than anything else. Symbolic gratitude aside, it seems kind of odd (to say the least) to celebrate cultural and ethnic genocide with turkey and football.

I remember once I had a page in a coloring book that was of a Thanksgiving scene. Everything in it seemed so foreign to me. Pork, chicken, fish, and oxtail were more available than turkey, Brussels sprouts certainly weren’t accessible, and cranberries were an elusive, magical fruit that showed up as cranberry juice cocktails once a year when I went to go see my grandparents in California over the summer holidays. The leaves on the trees on that coloring page didn’t match the shape of the trees outside my window. My us-born mom suggested I color them orange to match the season of Fall, but it was hot outside and the leaves were very much green. The snow on the ground in the scene certainly didn’t match the red clay earth and sand. None of the farm animals on the page looked like the water buffalo on the fields behind my house. Mishmash of cultural confusion yet again.

What I DO remember are the holidays that became a part of me, which I haven’t celebrated since the second big move. The second big move being when my parents separated and my mother and I moved to the US.

Songkran, Thai New Year, a celebration of the start of the rainy season, came in April. The county was enveloped in a giant water fight; no one was safe. Regardless what safeguards you took you would always come home soaking wet. This was by far my favorite holiday as a kid, and I actually have not celebrated it in 20 years. Chinese New Year was always in January or February, when Chinese-Thai families would celebrate with big family feasts and the kids would be gifted hongbaos, little red envelopes with some money.

Vegetarian Festival, or Nine Emperor Gods festival, always brought tales and stories of my friends seeing pictures of the rituals that took place at this time. To commemorate the holiday a number of vegan and vegetarian food stalls would pop-up all over town; I remember it being a treat when we would pull over and stop to eat at these places that would show up only once a year.

loi kratong was a welcomed holiday that came around november that aligns with the thai lunar calendar. It signaled a time when family gathered together, schools would dedicate time to the craft of making "kratongs" - floating altars made out of banana trunk and leaves, decorated with flowers, candles and incense. The evenings were a spectacle - hundreds of people gathering on the coast, around lakes and ponds, or rivers, sending their altars as an offering to the water spirits.

These are what I remember holidays to be. Holidays that yielded the most participants, holidays that weren’t sponsored by the expat community in order to give western traditions some sense of continuity for their kids. I didn’t realize that these were my holidays too, until I left for the United States.

At 12 I had my first Thanksgiving in the northern hemisphere. It felt empty and unfamiliar, though certainly punctuated with excitement that I got to try those elusive, mythical cranberries. The only family I was with for this holiday was my mom, and we were the Thanksgiving orphans (folks with no family or very small families) that got included in local familial celebrations, so each year was different. At the time my mom was not able to afford a cross-country round trip journey for two people just to see family for 3 - 4 days, so this holiday never conjured up feelings of “family” for me. Still doesn’t. And it’s strange to live in this liminal space while walking around the city, seeing big family gatherings around a turkey centerpiece lit by candlelight.

So now, in adulthood, Thanksgiving makes me want to be alone. Away from the chaos and flurry of gatherings of people for whom this holiday means something. Because for me, like a lot of things, it feels detached of meaning. Give me a nation-wide water fight instead.