The onslaught of the stress, anxiety and longing of the holiday season is never just limited to the abundance of Christmas TV commercials and secular Christmas music blaring in stores sometime right before Halloween.
The holidays aren’t complete without the macabre sight of our neediest brothers and sisters lined up all over town in inclement weather waiting for handouts — boxes of food, a turkey, clothing, maybe a voucher or two for free furniture.
This is their Black Friday.
While some of the rest of us camp outside Target and WalMart waiting for door-buster deals on flat-screen TVs, games and computers, our neediest counterparts are waiting for sustenance so they can be more like us on Thanksgiving Day.
And this annual sight — the greyest manifestation of their lives yearlong — breaks my heart and makes me thankful for the slightest things.
I have lately been thanking God aloud for heat, hot water, a bed, a paid Duke bill, an apartment, transportation, the audacity to choose what I want to eat, and for work — that ever-present sweat bee that dogs me and blesses me simultaneously.
The women I know are making their lists, shopping for turkeys and trimmings and setting up their respective kitchens for the annual Thanksgiving cook-a-thon.
My upstairs neighbor is doing her thing for her small family and her kitchen already looks like it’s in the early stages of holiday cooking and non-stop eating.
My sister-in-law already made her regularly scheduled phone call asking how many will be in my party so she can get an accurate head count for her spread.
I like that my family isn’t punitive and that none of us — especially we single, alternative-living family members — aren’t pressured to show up for holidays.
There have been years when I’ve gone to Brooklyn or simply to bed for Thanksgiving and there’s never domestic blowback because we’re all adults and know that holidays are mostly comprised of compressed pressures to be happy and present.
That can be a hard haul for some of us; holidays these days are really poignant, moody days the more our people go missing. There are empty spots for Darrell, mom, Kennedy.
I can never help but think of my mother, who pulled out all the stops on Thanksgiving. She’d start shopping and cooking days ahead of the big day and the refrigerator was strategically stuffed with all manner of Reynolds-wrapped dishes ready to be warmed and brought to life.
I always got a small bowl of naked noodles before they became macaroni and cheese. Then Kenny and I would fight over who’d get to lick the metal beaters of excess cake batter or icing. I’d sit with her or be underfoot in case she needed me to move a dish closer to her or crack the oven to check the dressing.
Bowls of homemade bread dough, covered with clean tea towels, sat atop the oven, rising for the third time. The kitchen was the warmest, most soulful room in the house.
Music from the living room stereo played The Spinners or Sarah Vaughan or Dionne Warwick or James Cleveland or Al Green or Aretha Franklin — anything that soundtracked my mother through days of prep work and baking and roasting, all while she tended to three precocious, busy children and a gaggle of older teenaged stepchildren.
Then cobblers, cakes and pans of rolls appeared in window seals to cool, and that’s when I knew there wasn’t much school left and weeks were about to be drastically truncated through to the end of the year.
And my young life was perfect and perfectly mapped out by food, school and family.
Of course, this has all drastically and dramatically changed, and being grown has whupped my ass in so many ways; however, it’s taught me that I am allowed to have my own feelings and make my own traditions free from the dusty traditions of our black Hallmark moments our parents constructed from the traditions they carried over from their own childhoods.
I always thought my mom was trying to reconfigure a more middle-class version of the mountain holidays her family had when she was a girl. And my father? It was all new to him and he did his damndest to give us holidays and vacations he never ever had as a boy.
So our parents were again children doing very grown-up things for their children, and somewhere in there the meaning of Thanksgiving got lost among all the pomp, circumstance, fatigue and routine extravagance.
I have to keep telling myself Thanksgiving is the one day sanctioned for true and pure fellowship and real outreach; that it’s OK to love outside our immediately selfish family circles and think about and give to our brothers and sisters.
It’s not all about turkey and whether to cook stuffing inside the bird or outside of it and call it dressing.
Who cares, really?
There are people standing outside waiting for food from strangers. On Thanksgiving, someone’s going to be walking the streets alone, maybe because they want to be or maybe because they’re orphaned of family and have nowhere to go on the one day everyone should.
In my sanctified imagination, I have built a table big enough for the Family of Man to sit and it’s called The Welcome Table where everyone is welcome, no questions asked, and at this table I have enough food and beverage for everyone to get full and we are laughing and getting to know one another even though we know we may never cross paths again.
At The Welcome Table my heart is full that I have been blessed to bless others.
As much as I would love to, in reality I have no idea how to make something like this happen, so I gave a little money to the Freestone Foodbank, money the agency doubled in its food drive to feed thousands of hungry Cincinnatians and it comforted my soul just a little bit to give thankfully.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2014.