Until I can have the family I need, I’ll spend my Thanksgiving alone

By David McElroy · November 21, 2018

I will spend Thanksgiving taking photographs. I’ll also eat some turkey and dressing. (It will be cornbread dressing made with the Southern Living recipe.) I’m probably going to a movie, too.

My day will be much like Thanksgiving for millions of Americans, but with one major difference. I’ll be spending my day alone.

Since I have no family of my own, I get invitations from kind friends every year to join their families for the day. I’ve had at least three sincere offers this year, including one as I left the office Wednesday afternoon. I always feel a little guilty turning down their kind offers, but the truth is that I’d rather be alone.

That’s misleading, though. What I’d really love — more than anything else in the world — is to spend Thanksgiving and every holiday with a wife and children who I love. But if I can’t have that, I’d rather spend the day alone — until I can finally start building the family I want and need.

Most people seem to feel sorry for those who choose to spend holidays alone, but I don’t understand that. There are quite a number of us who are happier alone than we would be spending time with other people’s families. It’s not that I don’t like other people — especially those nice enough to invite me — but it’s simply that I can’t get what I want from a “family holiday” without having the loving and stable family to go along with it.

My childhood memories of family holidays are mostly terrible. It’s hard to say why, but my father always seemed to find ways to be angry at someone in the household on Thanksgiving and Christmas, so there always seemed to be fear in the air. I remember bits and pieces of his angry outbursts on such days — such as the Thanksgiving when he angrily broke a measuring cup in the kitchen — and I remember walking on eggshells for the rest of the day.

As I’ve written before, our holidays were more “Norman Bates” than Norman Rockwell.

I think this is why I’ve always had such a fantasy of having happy and loving family holidays. I don’t need anything grand or expensive. I just need a warm and loving home with a wife who loves me and with children who know they are loved and adored. (And it would warm my heart to be able to take happy and loving photos of a wife and children on holidays, too.)

It’s not social interaction I need with others on Thanksgiving. It’s my own family that I need. Hanging out with somebody else’s family wouldn’t fill that need. At its best, it could just remind me of what I don’t have. At its worst, it could bore me silly and make me wish I were at home with Lucy and the cats instead.

I have a vivid picture in my mind of what I need. When I find the woman who also wants that — and wants to build it with me — we’ll see whether we can make that into a reality. Until then, I’ll spend my family holidays alone — by choice.

The very best way to spend a family holiday would be with my wife and children. The second best way to spend such a day is by myself. Spending it with anybody else — and pretending that it somehow substituted for what’s missing — would be the very worst choice.

A happy and loving family is the best thing a person can have in this world. If you have that, it should be at the top of your list Thursday to be thankful for.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving. I’ll enjoy mine alone — and I’ll be deep in thought and hope about the family Thanksgivings which I hope are still to come with a wife and children who love me.

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Lucy just made possible friends with two little girls, but the girls are more enthusiastic so far than she is. Joy, 5, and Hope, 6, just moved in with their grandmother on my street. I didn’t know this, but while Lucy and I were walking, I heard a tiny voice from the darkness cry out, “Hi, doggie!” It took me a minute to figure out where the voice was coming from, but once I did, their grandmother, Rose, came out onto the porch and gave the girls permission to pet Lucy, which delighted the girls. Joy said she wasn’t allowed off her porch since she had socks and no shoes. Lucy was shy, but allowed them to pet her a bit, while the girls marveled about how soft she is. I hope Lucy will let them be her friends. It’s a joy to see how far Lucy has come since she came to live with me. She’s nothing like the “special needs dog” who I was told would never get close to anybody.

I’ve never taken YouTube very seriously as a publishing platform — not enough to do anything more than post the occasional random video — but I’ve started laying a foundation for doing more with it in the future. I created and uploaded some simple branding to my longstanding YouTube channel this weekend and I’ll be doing more in the future. The channel has only about 300 subscribers, so if you feel so inclined, I would appreciate it if you’d subscribe. As with all things on social media, subscriber counts and views help me to get future content seen more easily by others. Click here to visit the channel.

Don‘t appeal to any piece of paper or any tradition as the source of your freedom. You don’t have “constitutional rights.” You have natural human rights. If you appeal to a document as the source of your rights, you are admitting that politicians can come along and amend your rights at any time. A right is yours because you are a human being, but it means nothing if you don’t have the means and the willingness to defend it. The sad truth today is that almost all of us are at the mercy of politicians who ignore our natural rights — and they get away with it only because they have educated our fellow humans to believe we have no legitimate choice other than obedience. Rebellion without the ability to win is insane — so don’t make this argument to police, politicians or judges — but it costs you nothing to come to a clear-eyed understanding today of what your rights really mean and where they come from.

Spring always reminds me how glorious blue skies and green leaves can be. When I was in the second grade, Mrs. Arnold chastised me for using those colors together. She said they didn’t match. Mrs. Arnold had very specific rules about which colors could be used together. We couldn’t deviate from her rules. When I used green and blue together in one of my class drawings, she forced me to do it over, since she said those colors shouldn’t be used together. I was a polite and obedient child, but I asked her why they didn’t match — since God used them together in nature. She was exasperated and told me to follow her rules. So when I see glorious beauty which mixes green and blue — such as this photo I took just outside my office Friday afternoon — it always reminds me of Mrs. Arnold. It reminds me that she was wrong. And it’s a good reminder for us all. There are established rules about a lot of things. Many of those are good rules. But if an expert tells you something and you know he’s wrong, you might need to take a chance. He might be just as mistaken as Mrs. Arnold was.

In the coming months and years, we’re going to need inventive and productive people pursuing things that matter. We’re going to need smart and self-directed men and women who will find ideas and create enterprises that will help bypass the political class and build a new and better society. But everything I see in media right now seems geared toward telling people how to entertain and amuse themselves. The stories are full of advice about what to binge on Netflix and what games you should be playing while you’re stuck at home. We desperately need to ignore this advice and be looking toward building new futures instead. Being passive consumers got us where we are today. It’s time that we reclaim our former role — the one that made this country wealthy — as productive and free people who build far more than we consume. This could be a great opportunity for those who will take it. Turn off Netflix. Put down the video game controller. We need new ideas, new achievements, new goals — not more coach potatoes. This is the time to be thinking and creating and planning for the future that you and I both want.

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