Thanksgiving -- our Teflon holiday

Think of Independence Day and you think of fireworks and hot dogs.

Think of Valentine’s Day and you think of millions of men running

red lights to buy flowers and candy in time.

For too many people, Christmas is a retail blur, a time when we

are supposed to pause and reflect, but end up shopping and dropping.

Labor Day and Veterans Day? Those mean a three-day weekend. And

Mother’s Day has been reduced by a conspiracy theory to an occasion

invented by greeting card companies to boost sales.

But there is one holiday that has withstood every attempt to

commer- cialize it or morph it into something else. Thanksgiving is

our Teflon holiday.

There is no other holiday like Thanksgiving. First, there is no

icon associated with it. Think of Thanksgiving and you won’t think of

a smiling turkey as you would a bunny on Easter Sunday.

On Thanksgiving, no gifts are exchanged. Even a greeting card

exchange seems out of place.

Let’s face it -- one of the reasons Thanksgiving has remained pure

is that Thanksgiving is a very cumbersome word. It doesn’t roll off

the tongue like Easter or Christmas or even Halloween. And if you did

want to promote Thanksgiving, what would you use as your angle?

The second thing that comes to my mind is the mountain of food

that’s on the table and how many times I can reach for the stuffing

without knocking over a wine glass.

The first thing I think of is family. Thanksgiving has become one

of the great family unifiers, surpassed only by Christmas and, in

some cases, exceeding it.

For the past few years, we’ve been heading down to San Diego to

have turkey and family with Cay’s brother, Jay West, and his family.

I’ve calculated that Jay’s wife, Linda, spends about five months

preparing for the day. Unfortunately, five months is about what it

has been taking us to drive down to San Diego from Orange County.

The first year we went down, the traffic was bumper to bumper from

the moment we got on the freeway at 11 a.m. to the moment we got off.

It was a brutal four-hour trip that left us wondering whether we’d be

back next year.

The next year, we decided to leave earlier to try and beat the

traffic. The plan was to leave at 9 a.m. But like a lot of families,

our schedule does not permit timeliness. So, we left at 10 a.m.

That trip was a little better. We shaved an hour off, which was

made easier to bear by discovering a radio station that just happened

to be playing “Alice’s Restaurant” by Arlo Guthrie. Then, just like

swinging from vine to vine, we found another one. The kids had never

heard this Thanksgiving tradition, so they listened and laughed along

with Cay and me, who’d heard it countless times.

Once we get to San Diego, the day is wonderful. It’s nothing but

friends and family without the pressure to exchange gifts or cards or

adhere to any particular schedule. Whatever happens, happens. “Want

to eat around 4?”

“Sure, fine. Whatever.”

One of the challenges facing the Smiths and Wests is the seating

arrangement. It seems that it was not too long ago that there were

clearly defined kids and clearly defined adults. The kids ate at the

kids’ table and the grown-ups ate at the grown-ups’ table.

But cousins Mark and Laura are both in college now. Cousin Dana is

in college, too, and the only real kids who qualify to eat at the

kids’ table are our two.

That makes things difficult, because the kids who are not yet

grown-ups want to sit at the grown-up table (you can tell the

difference because our table has booze), but there isn’t really room

to accommodate them. So they end up squeezing these nearly grown-up

bodies into a tight area around a table that used to work just fine.

I like Thanksgiving because it brings back good memories. Growing

up, it was the one time of year that our family was always together,

regardless of where we had to come from to get home.

And even though I’m not looking forward to the drive, I can’t wait

to get to San Diego.

I’ve even thought of a way to beat the traffic. We’re leaving

tomorrow instead.

* STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and freelance writer.

Readers may leave a message for him on the Daily Pilot hotline at

(949) 642-6086.