When Holidays Attack

Newsletter 2023-10-26

There’s a dark, all consuming menace on the horizon. It threatens to devour my time, my resources, and my sanity. I’m talking, of course, about the holidays. Thanksgiving and Christmas are just two days, yet they manage to completely absorb three months of the year. My family’s text thread is already overrun with complex negotiations about who can make it home when, trying to align work schedules, individual family obligations, and the expectations of society and various higher powers. Jesus is heavily invested in whether we decide to go to church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, while Gobblemaus, the evil turkey god, has a decided interest in what we put on our serving platter. If it were just those two days, the holidays wouldn’t be a problem, but their tentacles reach out to touch everything like a potato left in a dark pantry for too long. Lola and I both have parents, a fact I wasn’t fully aware of when I asked her to marry me. That means two sets of Christmases and Thanksgivings, plus the ones we throw for ourselves now that we have a horde of children. There’s also a friend’s Thanksgiving, known colloquially as Thanksfriends. If you thought it was called friendsgiving, you’ve been sorely misled by Gobblemaus. Many are his treacherous ways. Additionally, there are school programs, work parties, civic events, and a slew of ancillary obligations that make the stretch from Halloween to New Year’s an unbroken slog of mandatory tasks that threaten to double my blood pressure and body weight. The only reward for surviving that gauntlet is a nine-month break from the insanity. Just kidding. Holiday creep means that the Christmas season will start in August next year.

I often wonder if the pilgrims knew what they were unleashing when they sat down at that banquet table to mooch off the Indians all those years ago. Probably not since the origin story of Thanksgiving was tacked on after the fact. Human societies have had celebrations to show gratitude since the dawn of time. They’ve been complaining about those occasions for just as long. There are clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia where a mom laments having to panic clean her ziggurat before her entire family comes over for the holidays. Since origin stories are flexible, I wish America would pick a better one. We could base our Thanksgiving on a day in the 1980s when some guy’s friends unexpectedly all showed up to hang out in his basement and play Nintendo. Naturally, they ordered pizza and did a beer run, thus creating an organic day of thanks. If you ever find anything better than the holy triumvirate of beer, pizza, and video games, I regret to inform you that you’ve died and gone to heaven. Even on its own, pizza trumps turkey, which has to be cooked in the oven for six hours. If something takes that long to become edible, it wasn’t meant to be eaten in the first place. Pizza is good to go right out of the box. That’s how you know it’s perfect.

close up photo of pizza with cheese

We only eat most holiday foods once a year because that’s all the times it takes to remember they’re underwhelming. That first bite of cranberry sauce is a sufficient reminder that it’s best left in the can. The same goes for virtually any casserole that shows up at a holiday event. The universal recipe for this Midwestern potluck staple is to throw everything in the same glass dish and hope for the best. Usually, the best is achieved because food is delicious; therefore, stacking food on top of more food is unnecessary and reeks of putting on airs. You could simply eat one thing at a time like you do the rest of the year and save yourself a bunch of effort in the cooking process. Really, cooking isn’t necessary at all. Food scientists achieved perfection with the Twinkie. All other efforts in the kitchen pale in comparison. Skip your all-day cooking marathons and take a trip down the junk food aisle. America’s love language is cream filling.