It’s the first time since I’ve started working and told colleagues I won’t be going home for Thanksgiving when no one has asked me why I’m not going home. I haven’t been home for Thanksgiving since 2003 actually, so that’s quite a long time ago now – 14 years. Maybe my colleagues now just get that I like travel and that I see my family at other times of the year. Or maybe they just don’t care. That’s fine, too. I’d never enjoyed the insinuations that I don’t care about my family just because I don’t see them at Thanksgiving; it’s such an oversimplification of a relationship that is far more complicated than a random U.S. holiday.

Honestly, I like not seeing my family (immediate plus extended) for the major holidays of the year. I remember it always being stressful for Christmas when I’d come home during my school breaks and my early years in New York. My parents would always pick a fight with me and Ed about things like the gifts we were giving our cousins or cousins’ kids, what food I was making and if I served it to my dad first, who refused to eat with us. It was too much drama, and other than the food and seeing my brother, I never really cared about any of it at all. I rather have a Thanksgiving meal with my New York friends. There’s never really any drama other than the occasional disagreement about whether the Civil War was about economics or slavery (I think we realize… it was about BOTH), and I can enjoy the food and the company and not worry about someone yelling at me after.