Thanksgiving 2014

While I was living in Japan, my husband and I didn't always celebrate Thanksgiving. If we happened to have the day off, we would arrange to buy a turkey from an importer (turkeys are not commonly consumed in Japan and can't be purchased in regular stores). Most of the time, we just didn't bother as we preferred to save the expensive turkey for Christmas. Though we had to work most of the time on Christmas day as well (as it is not a national holiday in Japan), we would often arrange to celebrate the nearest day off before or after the holiday.

It wasn't until we came back to America that we really returned to Thanksgiving as a traditional holiday. I can't remember what we did the first year after returning, but I think we bought our own turkey and I cooked it. It was a small celebration and, obviously, not memorable.

The second Thanksgiving was spent at my sister-in-law's home. She and her husband host a big dinner every year and invite some of their friends and family. They didn't ask us to come the first year because we didn't really mesh with them at that point. I think they didn't really feel comfortable with us until later and they had their routine in place from the more than two decades in which we were in another country and had nothing to do with them.

This year is our third Thanksgiving in America and things between my sister-in-law and I have grown much closer in the past year. She has come to visit several times and usually stays for many hours (rarely fewer than four, often as long as six) and we talk about things which are quite deep and personal. So, this year was the first time that we felt like we really belonged with their family to a fair extent.

I know that people often tell Thanksgiving stories as if they were always full of family fights and animosity. I have to say that this past holiday seemed to pass without drama. In fact, I thought it was a lot of fun. The group included my sister-in-law, her husband, her two college-age sons, a long-time friend of the family and his girlfriend, my father-in-law, my husband, and me.

My sister-in-law's husband came from a family which built a fair bit of affluence and, when his father died, they inherited some beautiful silver and porcelain pieces which they use on special occasions. They set a lovely table and the husband is a great cook. He makes a gorgeous turkey, superior stuffing, and gravy that his kid's can't praise enough. The meal was excellent and full of varied traditional delights. One of the reasons that I prefer to go to their place rather than make my own Thanksgiving meal (something that I did for many years even in Japan) is that it isn't worthwhile to make a lot of dishes for two people, especially when my husband doesn't care for stuffing or sweet potatoes. I'd be making certain dishes for just one person (white mashed potatoes for him, sweet for me, stuffing for me, but not him, etc.).

After the meal, I noticed that my sister-in-law's husband eventually went into their living room and sat in front of his PC. That was no big deal to me as he's retired to that space in the past when I've carried out short visits. He's social enough, but he's also a bit of a geek. I assumed that he was exhausted after all of the effort that went into the occasion. An e-mail message from my sister-in-law informed me otherwise the following day.

It seems that her husband was incredibly stressed out because he was in the unfortunate position of being seated next to my father-in-law. My father-in-law could get a series of posts about his character if I ever chose to go into it all, but I'll try to just offer a brief description here. He is 77, selfish, self-involved, and hard of hearing, especially in one ear. He loves to be the center of attention, but his social skills mainly consist of talking about banal matters of interest only to him. He is actually a very intelligent person and capable of speaking about matters of depth, but he lives such a small life with little intellectual curiosity that he tends to not bring up any weighty topics of his own accord.

Sitting next to my father-in-law is a sufficiently tedious experience that my husband made sure last year to put himself between the two of us. He essentially took the bullet so I wouldn't have to. There was a reason for this beyond the self-centered smalltalk. My father-in-law had had a childish fit over some small thing last year and yelled at my husband the moment we walked into his home after going through some exhausting moving of our furniture and whatnot into our new apartment. We had been coming off of several weeks of incredible stress and pressure trying to find a place at all and my husband was super sick with bronchitis all the while starting his internship as a therapist. The pettiness of the reason for the attack had me not answering the phone when my father-in-law called for over a year. I just didn't want to deal with him alone.

At any rate, my sister-in-law's husband was seated on the "bad ear" side of my father-in-law while her husband's friend and his girlfriend were on the other side of said father-in-law. The father-in-law kept talking over the husband when he tried to converse with his guests and seemingly ignored him when he spoke directly to him. I witnessed my sister-in-law's husband try four times to talk to him and be blithely ignored or go unheard. I suggested he tap his shoulder and that seemed to work.

Even all of this may have been overlooked except that my sister-in-law and her husband live in attached housing with my father-in-law. Starting about six or seven years ago, my mother-in-law started to steeply decline because she suffered from a form of dementia which is similar to Parkinson's disease. During that time, my father-in-law increasingly relied on his daughter for help without expressing much gratitude and he has always taken his family for granted while providing very little in the way of support for them when they are in need. My sister-in-law once said, "He has always been selfish and stingy," and that sums it up pretty well. There's much more to tell on this front, but I will move along and cover that at a later time.

With the long history of being unhelpful and selfish as well as the father-in-law's increasing obtrusiveness, my sister-in-law's husband has grown less patient with everything. My sister-in-law said that there was an incident after Thanksgiving in which her dad came over to their house to borrow butter and he stood in front of the open refrigerator and asked where it was. The husband said, "We keep it close to the sun," and "It's in the oven." This response was offered because my father-in-law is so lazy that he doesn't take any time to think or look. He just asks his daughter to think and look for him. It's not that he is so absent-minded (though he has gotten more forgetful, of course). He's just accustomed to someone doing everything for him (as his wife did for many years until she grew too ill to meticulously care for him and dote on his every wish and need).

I should note that there was a little incident of this type of thing while I was there on Thanksgiving. My sister-in-law needed foil to wrap up leftovers for us and she asked her dad to get it from the pantry. He walked into the pantry. Looked in one spot and one spot only (directly in front of him on the shelves) and said he couldn't find it. I went in and actually looked around and found it on top of the dryer that was under the shelving. It was right on top. You just had to scan the space quickly to see it, but he just looks where he thinks it might be and gives up. She puts up with this nearly every day, sometimes up to six times per day.

At any rate, I thought this was a great and drama-free holiday, but it turned out that it was incredibly bile-raising for my sister-in-law's husband. To his credit, he didn't act out on his anger and frustration. He just walked away and tried to calm down. Under the circumstances, I thought that was really the best possible choice and I imagine that, if that's the most drama a person is going to witness at a family gathering, then I got off super easy. My sister-in-law's husband, unfortunately, did not.