Three Mantras to Get You Through Thanksgiving

If going home for the holiday feels more like hell for the holiday, read on.

Every Thanksgiving I have my annual viewing of the 1995 movie, Home for the Holidays. It’s a terrific ensemble of actors (Holly Hunter, Dylan McDermott, Robert Downey Jr., Anne Bancroft, Geraldine Chaplin, Charles Durning) that does a fabulous job depicting the underbelly of family get togethers: the rifts and rivalries, the tensions and love, and the way we both know and don’t know the people we call family. If you haven’t ever seen it, you really must, particularly if you are one of those people for whom the approach of the annual Thanksgiving gathering generates not gratitude but a vague, sinking sort of feeling accompanied by thoughts of a beach somewhere in Mexico.

I know exactly one person who loves getting together with family for the holidays. She tells of wonderful parents and siblings and spouses who actually like one another and who sit around laughing and drinking cider and playing Yahtzee. I don’t buy this story for one minute, but I nod and smile. During one memorable family gathering of mine, my mother looked at me across the table and remarked, “Kate, you look just like Meg Ryan with that haircut.” And then she added, “I hate Meg Ryan.”

For many of us, the holidays evoke more stress than gratitude, and for good reason. From the pleasures of holiday travel to the joy of being confined in a small space with people who A) haven’t gone to counseling B) drink too much or not at all and C) carry grudges and have memories like elephants, it’s an ordeal. And still we gather, entertaining the misguided wish that this time it might be different. We’ve had therapy. We can do this. We’re not going to let them get to us this time.

And then they do.

Family is equipped like nothing else on the planet to stir up the psychic debris you thought you’d gotten rid of. They do this by treating you as they always have. They do it by seeing you not as who you are, but who you are to them. Before you know it, you find yourself transformed into a small and terrible person, a person you do not wish to be, a person you aren’t. Or are you?

Family is tough, people, it just is. And I believe it is, in large part, because our family is here to facilitate our…

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