Holidays and Connection

 The New York Times article by Priya Krishna reminds me of how holidays can sometimes make isolation, like quarantine, even more apparent. Holidays are meant to be enjoyed with our loved ones, and when we can’t physically celebrate with those loved ones, the holiday is almost unrecognizable to the one we’re used to.

I personally did not grow up in a large family, so holidays were never a big community-oriented get together. I also did not grow up in a religious family, so I don’t have any holidays that are especially important to me. Having to celebrate holidays by myself across the country from my family while at college, however, always reminds me just how far from home I am. 

I am not a religious person, but there’s something so lonely about having to “celebrate” Easter alone. When I was a kid, I would decorate eggs with my parents, go on egg hunts, and make a large dinner with my parents at the end of the day. If I was back home, I probably would not go on egg hunts and would most likely not care about decorating eggs, but the Easter decorations around campus and Easter food served in the dining halls reminds me that I am not with my family. 

The holiday that hits me the hardest, however, is Thanksgiving. My mom and my dad are amazing cooks, and I developed a love of cooking from them. My grandpa on my mom’s side lives a few towns away in Massachusetts, but he is not your typical loving, joyous grandpa. He does not cook, but instead we would go to a big banquet hall in order to have a Thanksgiving dinner. His wife and her adult daughters are quite odd characters, and the banquet hall is loud and filled with other dysfunctional families. I love my grandpa, even if he is not the easiest person to get along with, and having Thanksgiving with him is rewarding in their own ways. 

But I love having Thanksgiving with my parents. I love cooking all day with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on (and later the Westminster Dog Show), taking a small lunch break of a cheese board and chit chat with my parents, and finally a big meal at the end of the day. My dad is proud of the beautiful Southwestern plants he tends to in our backyard, so he always sets the table very tenderly with twigs and leaves from our orange tree and bougainvillea flowers. 

Some years my grandma and my aunts on my dad’s side will come up from rural Arizona to visit. My grandma and my oldest aunt can sometimes be a lot to handle because they are your typical cowboy personalities, especially my aunt, who constantly has some long-winded story to tell us all. She is quite the character and she has always been the life of every Thanksgiving dinner I’ve ever had. I remember as a child listening to her tell me from across the table that the dimple in my cleft chin was from when I was still “a little angel baby” and was clawing onto the clouds of Heaven desperately pleading to not go down to Earth until God finally told me I had to go and pushed me down by my chin using his index finger. At a more recent Thanksgiving, my grandma started arguing with my aunt because she declared that she was a cowboy and my grandma responded, “No, you’re not a cowboy, missy… I grew up on the plains of Wyoming in a little cabin under the Tetons. You were raised in a suburban home in the heart of Phoenix and you’re a computer engineer. You’re no cowboy!” After listening to my aunt boast about being a cowboy all my life when she is most certainly not, in reality, a cowboy, it was like sweet revenge.

Spending Thanksgiving without my family always reminds me just how far from home I am. I dread the day that I’ll have to spend Christmas alone, too. Even the holidays I never would have assumed giving a second thought about, like Easter, make me miss family time. Thankfully, though, I have my own family out here. I had friends who invited me to decorate eggs with them and we even decorated sugar cookies afterward. Even that simple hour I spent doing that with them made me feel a little less homesick. 

I was not raised religious, but I was raised with a loving family whom I shared holidays and simple traditions with. Not celebrating those holidays and traditions can make you feel so disconnected from your community, so it is no surprise that religious communities did all that they could during the pandemic to still host religious celebrations. They give us a semblance of normalcy, and even celebrating over a computer camera can make a world of a difference.