My Mantra Going Into Thanksgiving This Year…

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Excerpt: Thanksgiving is going to look different this year—whether we want it to or not. But, different doesn’t have to mean worse. Here’s the mantra that I’m following to (hopefully) make things suck less.

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My mantra going into Thanksgiving this year is respect tradition, welcome innovation. One way to think about innovation is the carrying out of new combinations. Thanksgiving is going to look different this year—whether we want it to or not. But, different doesn’t have to mean worse. Sure, different might not be what we want, but, different is what we’ve got—it’s the reality of living in a pandemic-restricted life. And the quicker we accept our different for what it is, the quicker we can start coming up with unique and fun combinations for what opportunities we might have.

The question I’d like to pose to you is, what elements of Thanksgiving are your favorite and how can you uniquely combine them with your current restrictions to make a pandemic-restricted Thanksgiving suck less (and more memorable)?

• What dish do you look forward to the most every year? Can you FaceTime your loved one and have them walk you through the recipe for an hour?
• What activities are you going to miss doing the most? Can you think of a creative way to do it over Zoom? Virtual spoons? Virtual secret Santa? Virtual dinner prep?
• Maybe you’re going to miss being the Host/Hostess and taking care of the ones you care for the most. Can you meal prep a batch of Thanksgiving dinners and drop it off at their houses?
• Maybe you’re going to miss doing your traditional Turket Trot 8k Run. Can you do an 8k at the park with some friends and get just as dressed up and goofy as you normally would?

And how about some non-traditional combinations that you might be able to add in to your holiday?

• Maybe you and your loved ones can read passages from The Thanksgiving Reader—a collection of readings organized by Seth Godin.
• Maybe you can try a new activity like virtual musical chairs? Music is played over a Zoom call and when it stops, each family member has to type “Sat Down!” into the chat and whoever is last has to turn their video feed off. The game goes until one family member is left (HT to my mom).
• Or, if you’re simply going to miss having company, maybe you can arrange time to just hang-out virtually? No agenda or gratitude roundtables… just time to be with each other. While cooking, watching a movie, prepping a solo dinner, watching football?

To be clear, this isn’t a call to suppress your feelings or just forget about your traditions. Again, before you go into anything I listed above, step 1 is to confront and accept what you’re really feeling. If you’re sad, let yourself be sad. If you’re kind of relieved you don’t have to see your family, be relieved without guilt.

As Grace Dowd said in a Medium article, “We compound our own suffering when we tell ourselves we shouldn’t feel a certain way.” And choosing to skip acceptance and just force your way through the holiday, “will only make you feel worse because then you have the original grief [of not being able to have your traditional Thanksgiving] plus the added grief that your new way didn’t work either,” she elaborates.

Approach Thanksgiving this year with an open mind. Spend some time letting yourself really feel how you feel about your situation. And if you’d like to make the best of your situation for whatever it is, maybe spend some time thinking about how you might be able to uniquely combine tradition with innovation. Because one thing is true for just about all of us, this will be a Thanksgiving we won’t forget. Which begs the question, how would you most like it to be remembered? Once you have that figured out, work backwards from there. Stay safe and happy combining. I hope you, indeed, have a Happy Thanksgiving despite the mess.

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