Highs and Lows

Because, you know, the holidays.

        I'm not understanding the freakishly long carving fork. 

Happy Sunday, everyone! If you celebrated Thanksgiving, how did it go? Highs, lows? These last few years it’s been just me, Mom, Sam, and now little Coco. The meals have gotten simpler, since I used to make these ridiculously epic meals that put dinner being served at 9 or 10 p.m. after a day of carbfests and booze starting at breakfast, ensuring utter lethargy and possible unleashed long-simmering grievances by the time the bird (or ham or roast beast or Tofurkey) was served.

Or is that just my history? Ha. I remember one Thanksgiving when my friends and I lived in the Marina District just after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. We’d been soaking in mimosas since before the guests arrived, and Christy and I were tasked with prepping the turkey. I was rooting around inside the carcass for the giblets package, elbow-deep in dead animal, and I don’t know if it was the cheap champagne or simple revulsion, but a wave of nausea rolled through me and I became a vegetarian on the spot. I loaded up on non-meat options that day and all the days for the next ten years, until Mom and I were in a cafe in Windsor, England, where I ordered a cheese panini and side salad, and the salad arrived with a flourish of tuna on top. I’d been craving canned tuna for months - did I somehow broadcast this to the waiter? - so I took it as a sign and have been an omnivore ever since. I’m not proud of this fact, just noticing how little it can take to push a person off whatever variety of wagon they’re on.

But in my world these days, holidays are calm and sweet. No drama. Time with Mom and the dogs, great conversation, yummy food, and truly understanding just how good we have it. Which is pretty freaking good. Much gratitude.

Thanksgiving also marks the beginning of the downhill slide to the new year, the weird liminal phase where you don’t feel like you can really start anything because the holidays mean the world grinds to a halt, and if we’re honest, we don’t want to start anything anyway because maybe we don’t love the holidays, or maybe we’re just tired. Tired from the year, tired from the news, tired from the pressure we put on ourselves to be positive in a deeply wounded world.

But that’s not where I wanted this to go! Shake it off, Kahler! Let’s wrap up on that high note. One of mine is opening up the fridge and seeing all those containers of leftovers, and knowing I can eat turkey and potatoes and pie for every meal because anything else would be just plain wasteful. Talk about gratitude. :)

What about you? Let us know in the comments.