THANKSGIVING WAS ALWAYS TENSE while I was growing up, and I don’t know why. Christmas, now–Christmas was mostly fun and presents and carols and laughter, as I remember. But Thanksgiving was arguments and huffs and recriminations and doors slamming and one indistinguishable great-uncle or another rousing himself from his after-dinner torpor to growl, “Now, now,” from an easy chair, puffing through his mustache like an irritated walrus as he loosened his belt another notch. Thanksgiving was my sisters crying, and my aunt rising like Athena in righteousness at the dining-room table to shout, “You wretched insect,” and my father slipping off to the kitchen to sit at the counter and hold his head, muttering, “Every year. Every goddamn year.”
The rise of college football on television helped a little; at least it gave the younger men something to quarrel about besides the family. But even that wasn’t enough. One of my mother’s cousins had a way of asking, “Why can’t we all be united on this special day?” with a sort of simultaneously superior and plaintive sniff that, oddly enough, usually did manage to unite the family. Unfortunately, it united them only in shouting at her until they had driven her from the table in tears, her damp napkin fluttering down like a flag of surrender on her half-eaten cranberry sauce and sage stuffing.
