The Best Holiday

When I was a kid the end-all and be-all of holidays had to be Christmas.  I am guessing this is not an entirely shocking statement.  Most people love Christmas, I would think, especially as a kid.  If you were like me then you would plan and dream about your presents for what seemed like months in advance.  Back when I was a kid I spent a lot of time looking through catalogs at toys.  I would peer at the damn pictures of various Star Wars toy sets and day-dream about playing with the stupid things.  Then it was just a matter of waiting and enduring the sleepless night before Christmas before tearing into the presents.  By the end of the day, of course, you were pretty much bored with all of the toys and already planning for next year. For a long time Christmas was still my favorite.  It’s hard not to like the holiday.  The city of
Chicago does a lot to make Christmas beautiful.  I am imagining that your city does a lot to make things beautiful for the season as well.  Perhaps you haven’t really noticed for some time what your city does.  I recommend you take some time to notice the things the city does.  Look at the things hanging from the streetlights.  Take a tour of a neighborhood with a lot of lights.  Maybe take a trip downtown to whatever giant tree the city has put up. 

There is a problem with Christmas, however, and as I have gotten older the holiday has lost its “best-of” status.  I am wondering if you feel the same way.  For me the best holiday is, without a doubt, Thanksgiving.  See, the problem with Christmas is that there are presents involved.  Of course receiving presents is fantastic, but having to go out and buy them for people really kind of sucks.  There is very little that is worse than trying to buy gifts for people during the Christmas season.  I buy almost everything online and once managed to buy everything I needed online and didn’t have to step out of my house for Christmas shopping.  This is a good thing. With Thanksgiving there is none of that pressure.  I guess if you are invited over to someone’s home for the dinner you might want to bring some kind of gift but that’s probably just a bottle of wine or something.  It isn’t nearly the same kind of pressure as parking sixty-three miles from a mall and having to take a tram and a bus and a camel to get to the mall and then fight against sixteen trillion other shoppers who are all walking the opposite direction from you. 

Thanksgiving is all about eating.  How wonderful is that?  I guess, if you want to be technical about it, it is also about taking time to reflect on things and being thankful, but really, it’s about eating.  It is also about football and really, any holiday that combines stuffing yourself like a tick and then watching football as you fall asleep on the couch has to take the number one holiday status. There was a time when waking up during Thanksgiving meant getting up early to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  I have no idea why this was so exciting for me.  Watching a gigantic balloon Bullwinkle just doesn’t carry quite the same weight with me since I turned thirty.  My brother and sister-in-law got to at least see the parade in person at one time and that must have been a little bit cool. 

I guess I don’t really understand parades.  I ended up in one accidentally when I was younger because my brother was in Cub Scouts and my mom was den mother and they were in a parade and I just tagged along.  It wasn’t a huge big-deal parade but it was kind of cool to walk down the street.  They seem very crowded and you have to look up to see the balloons and then climb over the people in front of you to see the floats and marching bands.  Mostly you stand there in the cold and look desperately for a bathroom. Every city has a parade.  It’s cute to see the smaller cities have their own parades.  When you compare the celebrities and Broadway stars participating in the New York parade against the St. Louis Thanksgiving Day Parade, well, you just can see that the costs are much lower in one.  There are very few buildings in downtown St. Louis.  They have a few balloons but the one parade I saw on television when I lived there involved local universities manning the balloons and when I saw the balloon manned by the people from my university and saw they were all the people I regularly found passed out around campus on the weekend I knew this was not a parade to be taken seriously.  Apparently they would let anyone in this parade.  If you happen to be passing through St. Louis on Thanksgiving feel free to start walking in their parade because evidently they will let you. 

Chicago has a parade too and it tried really hard to be like the New York one.  They have a few balloons and they have some floats many of which look like those inflatable snow globe things you see on people’s lawns.  Whatever they try to do it just isn’t as intense or exciting as the Macy’s parade.   Anyway, these days Thanksgiving is more about sleeping in.  It’s a chance to really not have to do anything.  I guess for my mother or whomever is doing the cooking the day probably isn’t as easy-going as it is for the rest of us.  However, I cannot see past my own nose and so, I can only attest to the fact that I enjoy the day as one of relaxation.   

The smells fill the house and my father always wants to take bites out of the bird.  My mother worries and frets.  In the end, most of what Thanksgiving is about is family.  Over the years this has come to mean more and more than anything else.  At one time I was in
St. Louis.  At another time my brother lived in New York.  Now my brother is making a move out to Wisconsin.  As we fling ourselves further away from Chicago it becomes more rare and more important to have those special days when we are all together. There is nothing quite like having all of the family members sitting around a table.  My dad talks about politics and the news.  My brother talks about his job which the rest of us still don’t quite understand.  We laugh and we talk and it’s great.  Meanwhile the food piles up and it tastes fantastic and we eat and eat and eat. 

That’s what’s so great about this holiday.  Thanksgiving is the best holiday because it’s about eating and family and then football.  Plus, the turkey comes with its own sleeping drug already built in.  Any holiday with foods that contain a natural narcotic has to at least rank high on your list, doesn’t it? 
Bryan W. Alaspa’s new novel Dust is now available for sale at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.