Thanksgiving week makes me think about cranberry stains and fabric, about fabric as a manufactured thing. It’s impossible to forget the schmaltzy cotton industry commercial selling us/telling us that cotton is the fabric of our lives.
There are those who malign the manufactured-ness of the Thanksgiving holiday itself. My social justice activist friends deconstruct the premise and the marketing—the manufactured, sanitized, dominant-culture version of what we are told Thanksgiving should look like layered onto the colonists’ forceful domination of Native Americans. Modern images from advertisers—and, perhaps from our own memory banks—include gatherings of friends and family of all sizes, and more recently, variations in the types of families, who smile and laugh and hug as they greet each other and gather around a table. Norman Rockwell’s 1942 Freedom From Want painting, of course, iconized the dominant culture image of Thanksgiving. In elementary school in the 1970s, we made “Indian” vests out of brown paper grocery bags and “Pilgrim” hats and collars out of black and white construction paper. This year, there were Indian and Pilgrim photos shared on Facebook. Legend persists.
I wanted to write a post about Thanksgiving and families, maybe something humorous about the emotional high stakes of getting together, how expectations are elevated because Thanksgiving should be special. We often haven’t seen members of our family in a long time; it feels important for everything to go well. Inevitably things go wrong. Food is burned or spilled, or thrown. Someone drinks too much and makes a mess of the table or a relationship. Deep-seeded feuds boil to the surface unexpectedly, leaving mothers and daughters at opposite corners of the kitchen screaming at each other. Someone leaves the room crying. (Disclaimer: yes, I grew up in the South).
One Thanksgiving when I was in my late twenties or early thirties, I went to my parents house—as I had always done when I was single. They lived in a parsonage on St. Simons Island, Georgia, where my dad’s office was on the campus of Epworth By The Sea, the United Methodist Center. Living in a parsonage means that most of the furniture is not yours. Most of it, in fact, is donated furniture and that seemed especially so in their house on St. Simons because my dad wasn’t serving a church. This was a “conference parsonage” not owned or seen to by the traditional parsonage committee composed of congregation members. At least with a parsonage committee you had a few committed ladies, often with good taste, who for altruistic and a host of other reasons, cared about what the parsonage looked like—for better or worse. Sometimes this caring extended to telling the minister’s wife what colors to use, or having to vote before any painting or wallpapering could be done. In the end, we always knew we were living in someone else’s house.
Things were in some ways easier with the conference parsonage. When my parents moved there, while I was still in college, that first summer was spent re-wallpapering. We did it all ourselves. It was looking better. The most difficult had been the living room which had one shade of green carpet and a green velvet sofa of a different hue that clashed so much it almost made noise. Like most small ranch-style houses, the formal living room and dining room were on the front of the house.
It was this dining room, with a dated set of furniture (table, with leaves to expand, chairs, china cabinet), that my mother had decided to update—to re-cover the chair seats—in time for Thanksgiving. Living in parsonages all those years, she got very handy with DIY redecorating. She could refinish furniture, change the hardware, hang wallpaper, paint, make curtains—make anything, really with a sewing machine. And, she owned an electric upholstery stapler.
Of course for Thanksgiving dinner that year I was in my standard jeans and boots. This is important because, had I been wearing a dress, the debacle would have been so different. I had come home from Atlanta where I worked for a software company, where my life was not part of any storyline we had known growing up in a small town in South Georgia. I was now at least five years older than my mother had been when she had me, but I had no children. Convenient, for the family narrative, since I had no husband either. Nor did I bring anyone special home with me—regardless of relationship status. I dated women. Wearing jeans and boots at holidays was my attempt to assert my fledgling individuality. I was using edges to define my separateness—which most people did as teenagers. My curve may have been longer for a variety of reasons.
In any case, I had on jeans and was sitting at the table with my napkin over my thighs. Turns out, my legs were not squished together in ladylike fashion. I know this because the cranberry sauce that fell from my fork did not land on my napkin or my jeans. It plopped right through a gap between my legs onto the chair. I tried to wipe it up carefully. My sister, sitting beside me noticed. We immediately regressed to our 10-year-old selves—giggling outwardly, freaking out on the inside, because we both knew I was in big trouble.
Dinner was interrupted, the fabric stripped off the chair and treated. We were all in motion trying to do something, anything, while my mom took charge in a futile attempt to reclaim the pristine appearance of the new fabric. Our two guests (old family friends, thank goodness) were left at the table by themselves. The fabric never came clean and at every subsequent dining-room dinner, I had that as my own special chair—fabric more faded than the others, the stain hardly visible. My parents have been gone from that house for nearly 15 years now. The story has even faded from the rotation of family lore we laugh about during holiday dinner conversations. My partner, with whom I spend every Thanksgiving, knows the story well enough to tell it, but we have our own family now. Different fabric, different debacles.
To “manufacture” means “to make.” Similar to the definition of “create.” But manufacture adds the connotation of mass production and maybe that’s what’s so sinister to the critics of Thanksgiving as an American-manufactured holiday. It’s easy for me to get caught up in the larger injustices of the world and the sorrows of those who have been hurt—and who are hurting for many other reasons. But for now, I’m okay to stake out what may be a selfish place. Both mine and my partner’s immediate families of origin are all still with us, healthy, and as opinionated as ever. This year, I want to just enjoy the time off from work with our families. Manufactured, maybe. Meaningful, in many ways. Pass the turkey and let the cranberry sauce fall where it may.
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