Family-Free Turkey Day Unearths Self-Truths

The reason so many people love Thanksgiving is the same reason so many people hate Thanksgiving: It is the quintessential family holiday. No gifts, no religion, no parties or complicated rituals. Just a meal with relatives.

At the very least, it’s predictable. Every family has assigned roles that become the stuff of family lore--Mom cooks, Dad watches football, older brother tortures younger sister. The stories, the traditions, the pecan dressing (never oysters; it has to be pecans) are all part of a well-worn, well-loved package.

Until that year when something changes: Your only son’s new girlfriend persuades him to come to her parents’ for Thanksgiving. The newlyweds must choose between in-laws. Divorce, death, a cross-country move can alter everything. Suddenly, there’s a different set of traditions and expectations--which is why the first Thanksgiving away from home is so revealing. The sense of displacement also can bring life-changing realizations.

One year, a 25-year-old told her parents she would not--for the first time in her life--return to Boston that Thanksgiving. Her beau in Oklahoma, who had been flying to Washington to see her every other weekend for four months, wanted to take her home for Thanksgiving weekend.

Miss her family’s Thanksgiving dinner?

“The guilt was incredible,” remembers the woman, who declined to be identified out of deference to the boyfriend’s family. Her parents concluded that something serious was afoot; so did the woman, who could tell a marriage proposal was just around the corner.

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So she flew to Oklahoma City and was swept into the family’s cherished Thanksgiving weekend tradition: attending the Oklahoma-Nebraska football game.

“Didya bring something red to wear?” inquired one cousin sweetly. “You can borrow something if you need to.” They even offered to drive to Dallas to find a suitable outfit for the big day.

This was no mere football game; it was the family’s raison d’e^tre for the holiday weekend. Thanksgiving dinner itself was at a local restaurant because they were saving their energy for the big game on Saturday.

“To me, Thanksgiving meant food and family,” she says. “To him, it was football. It was all they talked about all weekend.”

She realized, to her horror, that she could never marry this man or his family. She broke up with him within a week.

“It would have never worked,” she says.

The first Thanksgiving away from home forces people to confront their place in the world. On Thanksgiving two years ago, Raul Fernandez, president of Internet technology firm Proxicom, was stuck in Munich, Germany, on a business trip. The high-tech world is filled with unsentimental workaholics, and Fernandez had worked on other holidays, but somehow this was different.

“I felt like I was missing in action,” says Fernandez, who came away with a sharper sense of the line between work and family.

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Christmas is full of sentiment and sharing, but it’s celebrated many ways: parties and open houses with friends, winter vacations, church services, collecting toys for tots, plays and concerts. Thanksgiving is a one-day gathering of family, a holiday that raises more questions of self-definition: whom we share our lives with, whom we belong to. Robert Frost never said it quite this way, but home is where they have to let you come for turkey and dressing.

That’s why so many people open their homes to stray friends on Thanksgiving. The notion of spending the holiday alone seems somehow wrong, and it’s always an act of generosity to extend an invitation. It’s much harder to be the odd man out, straddling that fine line between being a guest and being an adopted family member for the day.

“We always have outsiders, usually people who can’t make it home,” says Norma Ramsey, a wife, mother and charity fund-raiser in a Washington suburb. “The most important thing is to seat them next to someone fun so they feel at ease.

“I count myself very fortunate,” she says. “I’ve never had a Thanksgiving without my entire family--parents, sibling, in-laws. The holidays for us are about being together. If we go to my mother’s, everybody goes to my mother’s.”