Gratitude does not live on bread alone.
Time to expand the once-a-year standardized test
Well, it’s December. Which, to me, is Holiday Hoo-Be-Whatty time. And that means, a Holiday Hoo-Be-Whatty special! Between now and 12/31, paid subscriptions are 40% for the next 12 months. Oh, it’s the most wonderful time of year!
Thanksgiving is not Thanksgiving unless you go around the table and say what you’re thankful for.
Growing up, that was the standard set by sitcoms, angsty indie movies, and by the broader media landscape. Even theatre often used it as a plot point. Although, in plays—especially waspy living room plays set in New England—this ritual was usually the inciting incident for a 90 minute to two hour long evening full of venom-filled passive aggressive arguments, exposés of family secrets, and sometimes, all out physical brawls. No intermission though. Don’t want to lose all that momentum.
By the amount of opinion pieces and advice listicles I’ve seen floating around during this tenuous season, it seems that a lot of people are worried about similar explosive situations during the holidays this year. That worry is not unwarranted, of course. Things are tense. We have blueprints for the whole spectrum of outcomes in this situation. But we also can’t tell the future so who knows what could set off what.
The gratitude sharing circle has never been much of a consistent tradition at the Thanksgivings I’ve attended. There has usually been a grateful vibe in the atmosphere, I would say, but nothing particularly formalized by way of sharing those feelings. Except for, maybe, when I was a kid. I feel like we probably tried it a few times. We must have. It seems like something we would do.
As I get older, I’m starting to realize just how much effort all of us put into trying to be some sort of ‘ideal American family.’ My family, at least. We were attempting to live up to certain cultural expectations. Something like sharing what you’re grateful for around the Thanksgiving table is the embodiment of familial success. It’s a way to acknowledge only the best of times and never give into the worst of times. But, if you must mention the worst of times, it’s because you’re talking about how thankful you are to have come out of it and learned whatever greater lesson you learned. This is the way of perfection. To do the rituals because that is what you do.
We had no hope really. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had plenty of lovely Thanksgivings. We had no hope of being an ‘ideal American family.’ My brother and I, being four years apart in age, went through a period where we couldn’t be in the same room for more than five minutes without bickering. And we were latch-key kids, we were often in the same room alone together for much more than five minutes. The weapons are sharper when no one else is around. My family has a history of addiction, mental health, and physical health issues. Politically, my immediate family and I are pretty aligned—lucky—but that’s not true of myself and other relatives. I’m also a person living a life that not a lot of my extended family understands in any way. Not in the where, not in the how, not in the goals, not in the timeline, not in the trajectory. A Thanksgiving gratitude list doesn’t change any of that.
I do believe gratitude is a really important part of life. I, myself, have a gratitude practice that I’ve developed over the last couple of years. Like many people, I write down three things a night. Sometimes it’s as simple as, “I’m grateful I ate leftovers so I had less dishes to do.” But, whether big or small, I’ve found that taking even a few minutes for gratitude a day helps my brain. (Thanks Therapy!)
Gratitude as a standardized Thanksgiving ritual is, sometimes, a big ask with a lot of pressure. Beyond all the familial and/or event circumstances, it ignores the larger historical context (and horrors) that are so often glossed over at what is ‘supposed to be’ a ‘joyful’ time of year. A coerced gratitude also disregards the complexity of human emotions, how usually two things are true at once. Gratitude coexists with pain. Happiness coexists with disappointment. The ‘should’ of being thankful around specific holidays is missing nuance.
What I’m saying is, gratitude can’t live on bread alone.
There is a certain amount of passivity in a gratitude list that I have been thinking a lot about. When I write my list of three in the evening or if I were to say something around a holiday table, it’s always something that has already happened or I already have. Yes, sometimes those things come in and out or I feel grateful for them one day and not the next but the very act of writing it down or saying it outloud means I have it, it’s in my general vicinity. It’s important to acknowledge what has happened and what is had. It’s important to appreciate what and who around you makes your life better or, at least, more manageable. It’s important to appreciate what and who walks with you on your path.
And that is the active part of gratitude that I think we often miss, particularly when gratitude becomes like a standardized test.
To me, ‘thank you’ is a beginning, not an ending.
‘Thank you’ shows gratitude in an open way. It acknowledges what has been, what is, and what will be. It’s a sentence with any other punctuation besides a period. A gratitude list establishes a past, a ‘thank you’ creates a future.
It’s a little bit confusing, right? And all very existential. Although, at this point, I hope you expect nothing less from me. ‘Thank you’ is a way to show gratitude and therefore, in some ways, it’s just all parts of a whole. It all lives in the same universe. You know, the one we all live in. But again, nuance. There are usually separate parts that make up one mechanism. This is a time of year when there tends to be a lot of bigger mechanisms—holiday events, meals, get togethers, cultural events all on a common theme. This is a time of year where often nuts and bolts are looked past, forgotten, or allowed to rust.
Sharing gratitude out loud is powerful. Saying ‘thank you’ out loud is heartening. One or the other of them need not just be a yearly assignment.
Leaving room for all of the everything that makes us human is enveloping of everyone. All of it belongs at a holiday table.
Now this is something I can get behind.
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