Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian readers!
I’ll be celebrating it in a non-traditional manner today.
There won’t be any turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, or cranberry sauce.
Nothing I eat today will have a complicated recipe or take hours to cook. They won’t produce an obscene number of dishes to wash either.
I won’t be travelling long distances, or making small talk, or sitting at a crowded dining room table.
There will be delicious food in my near future. There is always room for delicious food in life. Some of it might even be pie, although it probably won’t be of the pumpkin variety.
There will be peace and quiet.
There will be freedom to do whatever it is I want to do on this holiday. Nothing will be forbidden or expected of me today.
There may be moments of reflection that aren’t at all pre-planned. I have a lot of things to be thankful in my life.
This isn’t to say that I dislike all traditional Thanksgiving festivities. They can be nice sometimes, but I really like trying other things on holidays. It’s fun to mix things up. A holiday can be like any other day if you want it to, just like an ordinary day can include some or all of the foods that you’d typically expect to find at a Thanksgiving dinner.
Non-traditional Thanksgiving celebrations are best because of how much freedom they give to you. This kind of flexibility is incredibly valuable. If you can learn how to enjoy more than one kind of Thanksgiving, you won’t feel bad when you’re living hundreds or thousands of miles away from family during the holidays, or when you need to work, or when you have another reason to celebrate them in a different way than you did last year.
So enjoy it if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving non-traditionally this year. I know I sure will!