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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It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

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