Thanksgiving Reminiscing

I absolutely LOVE Thanksgiving! It’s such a great day. I was thinking about it today and how most people love Christmas the best and I got to thinking about what the difference between those days is. Well, pretty much, in my family, the only difference is that on Christmas you open presents. That’s it. Both days have big meals as a family, afternoon naps, phone calls with family, games and movies together. Of course, the movies are usually different, but the point is that on both days, a lot of time is spent with family. Well, there seems to be less time spent together on Christmas because people tend to separate off to investigate whatever gifts they got. So, there is more family time on Thanksgiving.

When we were little, we all played around while mom made dinner, but as we’ve gotten older and are now adults, we started helping mom make dinner. For a few years, we went to different relatives’ houses for Thanksgiving, but then we started doing it at home and I like that better. It was nice seeing extended family sometimes, but most of the Bundy family didn’t really like us (mom and us kids) because we were steps and quite a few of them weren’t very nice to us when we’d come to visit. So, we all enjoyed the day a lot more once we started doing our own family thing. Now that we’ve all grown up, most of the Bundy family has accepted us and treat us all a lot more like family, so Bundy family gatherings are a much better experience than they used to be.

Anyways, I think one of my favorite thing about Thanksgiving when I was little was the fact that we got two days off from school and could play in the leaves as much as we wanted. We got to eat yummy food and do stuff together. I absolutely LOVE Thanksgiving food. Turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, rolls, pumpkin pie, cranberries, yams with marshmallows on top. Mmmmmmmm. Yum! Makes me wish I was home now. I’d love to be at my mom’s house right now to eat her food and then play outside in the leaves.  I kinda miss home today.

I remember the big leaf piles we used to make in our front yard when we were little and the fun we had jumping in them. I have pictures of us playing in the leaves one year, but they’re all in a storage unit in Utah. I had wanted to bring them with me and get a photo/negative scanner so I could digitize them while I was here, but there are several boxes of photos that I need to go through to get rid of the dumb ones (i have a lot of pictures of the ground…oops), the bad ones (tons of blurry ones from elementary school) and the duplicates (i have no idea why I always ordered photo prints in duplicate). Since I had limited space to bring stuff, I decided not to bring the photos.

The pictures of us playing in the leaves that I’m thinking about are from when my brother broke his leg. He broke his leg in the fall of his 5th grade year. I was in third grade, so I had just turned 8. Wow. That was forever ago! I remember running and jumping in one pile and landing on his leg because I had no idea he was in there. It was rather painful for both of us, probably more for him than me. lol. Poor guy.

I remember another year where we went out to the annual big afternoon dinner on Bundy Lane (yes, that was the name of the street because 5,000 Bundy’s lived out there) and then Chris and I were all excited because there was an X-Files marathon that afternoon. We weren’t allowed to watch X-Files, but we were going to watch it anyways because my sister drove us home early from the dinner (as soon as she got her driver’s license when I was 10, we left the dinner as soon as we could every year) and our parents stayed.

The last few Thanksgivings have been interesting. I was home for Thanksgiving in 2007 because my ex-husband was deployed and that was a crazy year. My step-brother, Shawn, and I have always had problems getting along and it wasn’t any different that year. I’ve had to rewrite this a few times because it doesn’t come out very nice. Let’s just say that he likes to be a jerk sometimes and his chosen topic was how everyone in the military deserves to die. I said some stuff to him and I think during the course of telling him he was clueless, I called him an idiot and he decided that the best course of action in response was to try to rearrange my face. Dad had to stop him and then asked me to leave. It was interesting. Worst Thanksgiving I’ve ever had? Probably.

Thanksgiving 2009 was strange, too. My ex-husband and I had decided to get a divorce in September 2009 and filed the papers at the beginning of November. Well, we tried to. We went to the courthouse and handed the clerk the papers, but she looked over them and said we had the wrong forms and needed to redo it, so we didn’t get them filed for real until the beginning of December. My ex-husband said he wasn’t ready to tell his sisters that we were getting divorced yet and asked me to have dinner with his family. He had decided to stay in Oklahoma, so I was going to Utah by myself. Talk about awkward. I promised him I wouldn’t say anything to his sisters about a divorce until we actually got the papers filed. Talk about awkward. His sisters are so sweet and nice. They kept asking me why I left Caleb alone for Thanksgiving and how come he didn’t come to Utah with me. It was difficult finding that line between keeping my promise and not lying. The only real truth I had that I could share was that he didn’t have the time off from work for the holiday and that he had encouraged me to go home and be with my family. I couldn’t tell them that he didn’t ask for the time off work because he didn’t want to have to tell them we were getting divorced. His parents knew, but none of his siblings did. So, his parents and I all played along so his sisters wouldn’t think anything was wrong. I spent part of Thanksgiving Day with his family and had lunch with his sisters before I flew home a couple days later. As awkward and uncomfortable as all that was, it was still a good Thanksgiving because I got to see my family and my best friend. They all totally made up for the craziness with all the fun we had. Jill even went with me to visit Caleb’s family when I first got there because I didn’t want to go alone. The rest of the week, we all played games just about every night and had a really great time. I spent pretty much every day with my mom and sister and we all ate dinner after dad got home before I’d take off with my friends to play games. Sometimes my friends would stay and my family would join the games with us. It was a lot of fun.

2010 was not such a fun holiday. I took the guy I was dating home with me for the weekend. That was crazy. He absolutely HATED my friends, so it was a bit of a rough weekend. My friends are a little on the crazy side and not really into sports all that much, so he couldn’t handle that. He actually told me the guys weren’t real men because they didn’t know sports stats. And he really hated one of them because Jared and I had gone on a few dates and hung out a lot the summer after high school. It wasn’t a horrible holiday, but it was a little hard to have a great time with someone who didn’t want to be around my friends and wouldn’t talk to my family very much. He actually wanted to leave and go back to Oklahoma a few days early because he really didn’t want to be around my friends. He told me it was the worst Thanksgiving he’d ever experienced. It was a little stressful. He hated my best friend, too, which I didn’t understand because she was always really nice to him. They all were. Every time he felt slighted or whatever, I tried to play peace-maker and let everyone know he was unhappy. They all tried to be sensitive to his feelings, but it just ended up being rough on everyone. They all felt like nothing they did was right and I didn’t know how to fix the situation. We had fun for the most part, but it was just a rough weekend. I think that is the only Thanksgiving where I regretted going home. Mostly I think it was regret for taking him with me. But, live and learn, right?

Thanksgiving 2011 was much better. I got to spend in Oklahoma with my friend, Becky, and her family. I couldn’t go home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas like had I had been for the past few years, so I opted to spend Thanksgiving in Oklahoma and do Christmas in Utah. When Becky found out I was staying in Oklahoma, she immediately invited me to spend the holiday with her family. It was fun. She made yummy food and we all just hung out playing games and watching movies. Her two youngest, ages 2 and 4 at the time, decided they wanted to do my hair while one of the twins, age 10 at the time, took pictures and laughed. That was a lot of fun. I miss her family. Those were some great kids.

This year, I am in Malaysia. How crazy is that! I never in my life thought I would spend Thanksgiving in Southeast Asia. My ex-husband had wanted to get stationed in Japan, but I never honestly thought it would happen. Turns out, I was right about not ever living in Japan. I ended up in Malaysia instead! Crazy! And so far I love it here. I’m a little homesick today, though, because I haven’t been home for Thanksgiving for two years now. It almost feels life I’ve missed more than that because the last Thanksgiving I was home wasn’t exactly the wonderful time I had anticipated it would be. The only other years I missed were 2006 (I’d just gotten married), 2008 (we had just gotten stationed in Oklahoma two months before and my ex-husband wasn’t allowed the time off) and 2011 (I couldn’t take both holidays because more people wanted time off for Thanksgiving than the previous years). So, I haven’t missed a lot of Thanksgiving dinners with my family. Never two in a row before. But I didn’t anticipate being out of the country. I’m sure if I were in Oklahoma or anywhere in the US, both Troy and I would be in Utah right now. Oh well. It will still be a good holiday. Troy’s coworkers are all doing a Thanksgiving dinner party this Saturday, so at least there will be that. Not sure if it will just be people drinking and eating and acting retarded or if there will be games or what. I’m not such a fan of being around people who are drinking. That’s just not my scene, but they did a dinner party last month where everyone was drinking and nobody acted crazy, so I’m pretty sure it will be okay.