The U.S Thanksgiving holiday was yesterday and hubby and I went to spend the day and night with my daughter, her hubby, and our grandson. Included around the dinner table was my son-in-law's family. It was a wonderful gathering of cultures, ages, and great food, and it has now started a yearly tradition where we all gather at my daughter's home for the holiday. This makes it easy for her because she has a small child, so traveling is difficult at best on a holiday.
I heard on the news that this year there will be over 55 million people on the roads during the Thanksgiving 5 day ritual.
That's a lot of planes, trains, and authomobiles.
As an only child, I have vivid memories of every holiday trekking via public transportation ( my mom and stepdad didn't drive) from Staten Island to Brooklyn to see my grandmother. This trip usually involved a ferry ride, three different train changes, and then a long, long, four-block walk. If we left at 8a.m. we usually arrived around 12:30-1ish. Remember, this was a holiday so public transportation ran on holiday schedules ( read: limited service) I remember complaining at every step of the way. When are we gonna be there? I'm starving. Can't we take a cab? Why don't you learn to drive? I'm sure I made my parents nuts. But it was important we go see my grandmother, my mother said, so we could spend the day with her since we didn't see her all that often. (I'm sure if my parents drove we could have done the trip in a third of the time.) It was important, my mother told me during my complaining times, for family to stick together and spend as much time as possible together, especially around the holidays.
I always asked why and she always said the same thing: because people don't live forever and we're gonna miss her when she's gone.
Fast forward a few decades and my daughter was born. For the first 4 years of her life we lived in Wisconsin and every holiday we took two planes to come back to NY to see hubby's family and mine during the highest travel times of the year. Have you ever been on a plane with a three-month-old with ear issues? Or a toddler who hates being restrained in a seat? If you have you know the frustration I lived through.
When I complained about traveling with a baby and then a small child, especially on planes, and asked why we just couldn't spend the holiday in our own home, Hubby said because it was important for our daughter to know her family. Besides, he said, people don't live forever. We want to foster our daughter's relationships with her family as much as we can so she'll have wonderful memories of them in the years to come.
Fast forward another two decades. My daughter is now a mother. The difference now, though, is that I will never make her travel to see me for a holiday unless she wants to. It is so much easier for hubby and I to go to her. As I said, I remember vividly what it was like as a child to schlep on trains, planes, and buses. I want my daughter, who by the way never had a Christmas morning in her own home her entire childhood and early adulthood, to experience the joy of her own children waking up on Christmas morning, finding that Santa came, and then spending a slow, relaxing, wonderful and easy morning opening presents without the thought to get dressed in order to drive for hours to grandma's house.
Thanksgiving, supposedly, is the busiest travel day of the year. I believe it. I've been on the road every single Thanksgiving for 62 years. The traffic is horrible, kids are whining, the weather never cooperates, and parents have frayed nerve endings.
Why do we do it? Why do we schlep all over the place during the few days a year we should be relaxing and staying home?
Because it's important for family to be together - especially during these uncertain times. We want our children to have relationships and to know their relatives, grandparents, cousins.
Family is the most important thing we have.
Besides, the people you love won't be around forever.
