A Haunted Holiday
A table set for all the versions of you.
When I was 22, I spent Thanksgiving in Chicago with my comedian-turned-carpenter brother and our younger sister. We spent the weekend eating thai food on the floor of his dirty apartment and walking around the city in hand-me-down coats we never needed back home in Texas.
He showed us all around downtown Chicago – his small corner of it first and then all the touristy attractions after that. I remember standing between my siblings in front of that ridiculous silver bean, our bodies stretched and shrunk to silly degrees. The image comes back to me so easily – the three of us melting into each other, united, I think, for the first time.
I remember thinking how nice it was to make new friends with people you’ve known since you (or they) were born. Maybe some siblings get that earlier in life. For us, friendship was hard earned through shared trauma and familial chaos. Which makes it sweeter, in a way. Or at least stronger.
A few years before that, I spent Thanksgiving in my college town, lazily asking for the attention of a boy I loved at the time but shouldn’t have. All our friends left town for the holiday, but he was staying around to pick up extra shifts at work and, I think, to avoid his family.
I found some excuse to stay too – something about studying or grad school entrance exams – and we spent Thanksgiving Day eating cold turkey sandwiches under blankets on his front porch.
I read books while he went to work, and we spent the evenings listening to John Prine and drinking bad wine out of coffee mugs. I didn’t spend a minute studying that weekend, but I learned a lot. Mostly about emptiness. The kind that feels so new when you’re young and life hasn’t had the chance to disappoint you yet. The kind that comes from asking to be loved too quietly for anyone to hear.
At 27, I spent my very first Thanksgiving in NYC. I was newly married, new to New York, and living on the 14th floor of a building on 6th Ave. Of my many terrible decisions from that season, living in midtown proved to be in the top five, with the one notable exception of living in a building that overlooked the Macy’s day parade.
My then-in laws came to town and I’d Pinterested and prepped to serve everyone brunch in our tiny studio apartment. I made little turkeys out of cinnamon rolls with bacon spread out like feathers. There was a spread of fancy crackers and cheese I’d bought at Murray’s, a holiday cocktail served in glasses with sprigs of rosemary floating on top, and a bottomless pot of coffee we poured mostly for warmth as we huddled onto the balcony in the cold.
We were eye level with the balloons as they floated by, bobbing along like bath toys. Christmas music played loudly from an apartment nearby and our noses turned bubblegum pink as we stood side by side against the wind.
It all felt so festive and dreamy, standing there above the magic that is New York during the holidays.
Until I saw the people below the balloons. There were hordes of them – balloon handlers, as they’re called. They shuffled around frantically, clinging to a web of ropes designed to level the weight of the characters waltzing above them.
They looked manic. Running up and down and into each other while their hands rubbed raw from the friction and the cold. But by design, no one was looking at them. Their effort went largely unnoticed. We were all too busy standing there smiling stupidly at Ronald McDonald and Charlie Brown, bloated and bouncing along in the sky.
I know now, thanks to an embarrassingly long internet deep dive, that the balloon handler position is actually a coveted one. But that morning, I assumed, or rather, projected, a deep sadness to their experience: all that effort to just keep their feet on the ground, an entire war waged just out of everyone’s sight.
This year, I’ll spend Thanksgiving with my (second) husband and our daughter, seeing family on both sides and, inevitably, watching the Cowboys game (read: napping).
And maybe in a few years I’ll write a newsletter reflecting on this Thanksgiving in a similarly wistful way as these others.
It is, after all, our first holiday season with a baby. Our third together as the two of us (three including Hudson!). And I imagine the nostalgia of these early years as a family – the chaos of figuring out bedtimes and pack ‘n plays and the sweetness of little footie pajamas with turkeys all over them – will burn ever deeper as time passes.
Because that’s the thing about the holidays, they serve as a sort of time stamp each year. A marker for this particular season in life; an Ebeneezer to whatever grief or goodness is present at the time.
They bring with them an inherent degree of reflection. You can’t help but notice all that’s happened since this same day last year.
For us, last Thanksgiving fell just after we’d told our families we were pregnant. I was exhausted and perpetually on the edge of throwing up and flooded with anxiety about whether or not we’d make it through the first trimester. But I was also a deep, down to my bones, can’t find the words, crying all the time kind of happy that I might get to bring a baby into the world.
I get a little weepy thinking about it. The exhaustion and nausea feel like so long ago. (Actually no, the exhaustion is still here, but you get the idea.) We didn’t even know she was a girl yet. We didn’t know her name or that she’d have the most perfect little Whoville nose or that she’d fulfill every ounce of that expectant happiness the second she entered the world.
We just knew she was coming. And now, a year later, she’s here and time feels so wobbly and intangible and precious and kind.
It happens every year in varying degrees. The table is set and the food is served and the distinct, milestone of this particular year is marked in its silent, subtle way.
And yet, at the same time, strangely, each year is some bizarre amalgamation of all the years that came before it. Every version of you sits gathered around the table like extended family, telling their old stories and asking invasive questions about your life.
I used to hate it. I’d come home for the holidays in college and feel haunted by the high school version of me still tacking My Chemical Romance posters on the wall. Or I’d come home in my early 20’s and be hit with the stark reality that I thought I’d be spending the holidays with that John Prine boyfriend of mine and instead I’m splitting a piece of pie with my childhood dog.
Don’t even get me started on that first holiday season after my divorce. I was the loneliest I’d ever been, surrounded by every past version of me, feeling like the butt of all their jokes.
When life hasn’t gone the way you expected (which is to say, always), the holidays can feel like a highlight reel of foolish hopes you once held and bad decisions you made because of them.
And even when things are going well, nostalgia always greets you with a sting. Time passes and life changes and the ghosts of younger you show up for dinner every year regardless of if you invited them.
It’s easy to bemoan their presence. Or even ignore it. But this year – maybe because I’m extra sentimental (hormonal?) after having a baby, because I’m so acutely aware right now of how precious and fast and convoluted and beautiful life can be – I find myself wanting to invite all those old versions of me to hang around for a while. To pour a drink and grab a chair and load their plate up with seconds. To tell their stories over again. To start from the beginning.
I want my daughter around to hear (most of) them. To grow up knowing them like lore.
I want her to know how cold the pad thai was when it finally arrived that night in Chicago. How strange and lucky I felt to realize my siblings had become my best friends. How good and right and worth it it is to love and be loved, to forgive and be forgiven, to give space and to ask for it in return so that everyone in the family has room to be fully, safely themselves.
I want her to know how hard I fought to figure out who I was in college outside of a bad boyfriend. And how easy it is to fall into shitty relationships if you’re not careful.
I want her to know that three houses down from that porch with the bad wine and the dumb boy lived two girls that became my best friends and helped me heal from all that nonsense – two girls that I still talk to every day, 15 years later. I want her to know how rare and precious deep friendships can be. How they are a gift from God, worth praying for and investing in at all costs.
And I want her to know that boys can be incredibly dumb, especially when they’re young, but that not all of them are. Some of them, like her dad, are gentle and kind and patient and worth waiting for. Some of them will love you well without you having to ask.
I want her to know that New York City is the greatest city in the world. And that living there is a dream and a drug but is also stupid expensive so maybe just visit during the holidays.
I want her to know that sometimes you’re standing on a balcony surrounded by so much newness and life can feel dreamy and festive and too good to be true. And sometimes it is too good to be true. Sometimes people deceive you. Sometimes you’re thrown off that balcony and are suddenly below the balloons trying desperately to hold on. Most people won’t know where you went or that your hands are bleeding from the rub. It’s OK to ask for help then. And sometimes, it’s OK to let go.
I want her to know that sometimes your heart gets broken so badly you think you’ll never recover. But then you do. And one day you’ll realize you don’t even think about it that much anymore. One day you get back to just enjoying the parade.
And I want her to know that sometimes your heart gets everything it never knew it wanted all at once. Sometimes the Lord is more gracious to you than you ever thought possible just because it His heart to do so. Sometimes you wake up one day and find yourself married to your best friend, holding the squishy, giggly baby you made together, dressing her in turkey footie pajamas for her very first Thanksgiving.
I want all the stories to be told. I want more of them to be written. I want to hear everyone else’s too and to celebrate together how weird and wonderful this life can be.
Every milestone, good or bad, marks another year of God’s faithfulness. And if, instead of bemoaning all the ghosts of our past, we take the opportunity to see all the ways He’s been present and gracious and longsuffering and kind, we will make way for hope where there once was heartache.
So wherever you find yourself this Thanksgiving – whatever grief or goodness this year marks for you – I hope you make space for every version of you and your loved ones to tell their stories and reflect on God’s faithfulness together.
I hope your table is filled with memories of mercy, with heartache turned to hope, with unrealized expectations shadowed by expectant joy.
I hope you’re gracious with yourself, past and present, knowing that you cannot be outside the will of God – that your mistakes are not that meaningful in light of His sovereignty and grace.
And I hope your Thanksgiving is marked by gratitude, community, football naps, parades, and turkey footie pajamas, if you’re lucky.
So good Bailey. Thank you for writing!!
YES BAILEY. So good. 😭🫶🏼