So, Thanksgiving is just two days away and I’ve done the shopping and made my prep lists.  I am excited to cook, eat and drink (even got a new Zinfandel to try!).  I’m lucky to spend Thanksgiving with my husband and am grateful that we have a home, food on the table and lots of love in our house.  All is good, right?  Then why am I feeling so blue?  It happens every year.  The holiday season comes and I get sad.  I would say depressed, but I think that is too strong a word.  More of a general melancholy that I must battle through and not let it make me a weepy nut.  So, this year, the blues set in and I really started to analyze the why of them.  Why do I feel sad?  What is causing this impulse to run crying into the bedroom, shut the blinds and stay there until January second?  Then, I had an epiphany.  It came while I was watching television.  There was a commercial on and it showed a very happy and functional family enjoying the holidays.  Right away I became sad.  See, I like many people, did not grow up in a “functional” family.   Our family holidays NEVER looked like any I saw on T.V.   In fact, they still don’t.  Yet every year I get sad and wonder why we couldn’t (and still can’t) have a “normal” holiday.  That is it, you see, these great expectations are killing me.

Let’s face it, we all KNOW how our families behave.  So why around the holidays do we expect them to magically change from the Osbournes into the Brady Bunch?  Why do we think that just because it is Thanksgiving (or Christmas) that our families will somehow become different people?  That the “magic” of the holidays will transform them into the family you always wished you had…  Because it doesn’t.  They are not only the same people they have always been, they are also maybe a little worse due to the tensions and stress of the holiday.  Yet year after year we cling to these great expectations that something will change and get sad when it doesn’t.

So this holiday season I’m taking a different approach.  I’m stopping these ridiculous expectations and embracing the reality of my family (a family that I love very much).  I will feel grateful for every moment I get to spend with my sisters and love them for who they are, not who I would like them to be.  I will watch my Dad, with all his “quirks”, and be thankful that he is still on this planet to celebrate with me.  Because life is short and when all is said and done, it is these crazy moments that will mean the most to us.

I do believe that the families we see on T.V. are a fantasy that most of us will never realize.  And really, who wants them?  It is the insanity of my family that made me the person that I am today and I happen to like that person.  Besides, I think if I DID grow up in a family like the Brady Bunch they would have disowned me a long time ago.   But my crazy family?  They “get” me and let me be.  So let us all do away with these great expectations and be grateful for the family we have and the precious time we get to spend with them.