I'm starting to get the holiday blues. I've got Turkey envy. What I mean is that I see all these holiday episodes and movies and the commercials on TV, and I want what they show.
I want a huge table laden with holiday food. I want extended family to come in and impose, crazy aunts to avoid, and a fight to erupt at the dinner table. I want snow and wine and candlelight. I want people dressed in pearls and sweater vests. I want three different kinds of pumpkin pie.
My holidays? Oh, they're fine, but they're just as bland as the food my mom serves. It's just the immediate family at the dinner table, eating the same thing every year: turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, peas, cranberry sauce, brown and serve rolls, and sparkling cider. Dessert is apple pie and pumpkin pie (store bought). That's it. The same six faces around the same old table, in the same old dining room, eating the same old food.
We did mix it up for a couple of years. We went to my grandparent's trailer in the desert where we participated in a pot luck. Those Thanksgivings were a bunch of old people sitting at picnic tables, holding the tablecloth down with rocks, eating jello salad and ambrosia.
See how pessimistic I sound? The blues, holiday blues.