At Wally World the other day it didn’t register WHY a man stood beside the door ringing a bell. I only noticed he danced around with his headphones on. I wondered what was on his ipod but other than that I didn’t think about the fact that he stood there because it’s the holiday season. He wanted donations for the United Way. I got that but still, I wasn’t thinking along the lines of the holidays. I don’t celebrate them so I suppose I see things differently. I have to remember that even if I don’t think in those terms many others do. I have to try and remind myself (via email notification) that many of my friends will be kind of busy with family and friends. I wouldn’t want to call on Wednesday or Thursday expecting a friendly chat only to find that I’ve interrupted their celebration.
Can someone really totally and completely forget the holiday right up until the day of or even past it? Think about this for a minute, say you’re driving a car. You get in, you put the keys in the ignition, you look both ways and you pull off. That’s what drivers do. But suppose you don’t drive. What do you do? You immediately walk around to the passenger’s side door. You don’t go for the driver’s seat at all. It’s unnatural to do so. You’ve never done it before. You go for the seat you know, the seat you’ve always taken. You might be wondering, but with that darned holiday music and the trees all over, commercials about the perfect gift you can’t possibly be that dulled to the holiday season. People that don’t drive see cars everyday. They see different makes and models. New ones come out at certain times. They may even appreciate one make and model over another but it doesn’t mean they’re in the same mind set as a driver. Toyota advertises it’s big sale. Honda tries to out sell Toyota. The advertisements are everywhere. But still, if you’ve never driven are you really paying that much attention to car advertisements? Advertisements or no, if you don’t drive you all but block out information about driving if it doesn’t pertain to you on a personal level. They come every year with the coloured eggs, fright masks and holly but since that information doesn’t pertain to me I do what comes naturally, I go for the passengers side door. It’s normal for me.
This brings me to feeling down or blue on holidays. Since I don’t celebrate them then it’s just another day for me. I have no real mood change due to holidays. I get up, I take my shower, I drink my coffee, I start my day. It’s routine. Holidays for me are the same as Toyota sales. I’m no happier the days leading up to the sale, the day of the sale nor the day after. I’m not “a driver” so my mind all but blocks out that information. My brain looks for information it can compute. I go for the passenger side.
Since I was a kid the holidays have snuck up on my family. There’s a standing joke that there’s an R & S Holiday Mistake. (The R is her maiden name and the S was her married name.) It’s no secret that my mother’s cooking could be counted as abuse. Since she didn’t want to eat her own coking we ate out a lot. When we ate out we ate well. No fast food, no happy meals or Red Lobster type stuff. We ate well UNLESS it was Christmas or Thanksgiving or Easter. Our regular spots were closed so our options were limited. To Denny’s we went. Since she forgot to go to the store (she was riding not driving) we ended up with no food in the house and nothing to eat every single solitary holiday growing up it was like that. So, every single solitary holiday we ended up at Denny’s. It became tradition for us. She’d swear she would remember next year but nope, she forgot and so did my sister and brother. It snuck up on us so there we were at Denny’s every holiday, every year. I have to wonder sometimes if she loathed the thought of having to cook some horrible meal she’d have to eat so that’s why she forgot to go to the store. Either way, we laughed at the dinner table at the worst restraint in the city. Ah, I hated that place. The food isn’t that great, the booths were sticky and back then they weren’t really that friendly to person of the darker persuasion. However, somehow we made that day laughable and fun. It was like any other meal though. There was no special thanks given, no special food to commemorate the day. It was another meal for us, another car ride we were not emotionally attached to. So, please don’t think this was our holiday meal. We ate and we went home and did what we always did.
I look back on that and laugh because it was like dang it we were suppose to remember. But we never did. I don’t think of that time as a bad time. I remember it fondly. To start calling it the R & S Holiday Mistake was just too funny. Many times there wasn’t a can of green beans in the house. The woman knew she couldn’t cook so why even try? That was quite the blessing, her taking us out instead of forcing us to eat her culinary disasters. I have a feeling one of the main reasons I cook every meal (if at all possible) is because I ate out so much as a child. I managed to break the tradition because of my love for cooking at home so this year and last year and the year before I did get into the passengers seat, so to speak, but I had a safety belt. I had food in the cupboard. No Denny’s for this girl. I’ll have something homemade, something warm and inviting just like yesterday and just like today, warm and inviting. Then on Tuesday I’ll get an email reminding me that Wednesday and Thursday I need to make room for other traffic.
Austin’s August
Tradition- Random Memory Friday
Friday, November 16, 2007-11:18PM EST
Update:
At Walmart the lady from the singing group Destiny’s Child bellowed out the most beautiful sounding Christmas song. The harmony was magnificent. I remember thinking, “For someone who coined the term “bootylicious” she sure can crune a holiday song.”
what is bootylicious? check the wiki on it.
Austin
It sounds to me like your holiday dinners had more holiday in them than most peoples. It doesn’t matter what you eat or where you eat it; how many gifts you give or how many gifts you receive. You remember laughing and being together. The whole holiday idea is getting together with friends and family and enjoying the company of each other. The idea of food sharing is an instinct with humans; the breaking of bread; a giving; a holiday; all part of what bonds us. The lights, Christmas trees, presents, Santa Clause are all hype designed to put people in the “holiday” spirit.
As far as Denny’s employees not being as curtious to the people of darker persuasion (and I’m sure this is acurate), could it have been more that they were jealous of watching so many having a wonderful holiday while they were stuck working? The reason I ask this is because all my working life, I had jobs that demanded that I work holidays. In the past 22 years, I had the days to visit and enjoy the holiday, but then would have to spend the evening working. I tried this a couple of times but having to leave a wonderful party or visit with friends to report to the job made me the most miserable, grouchy, witchy creature that ever existed. I eventually quit attending parties on days I had to work and it worked out much better. However, I must admit that holidays don’t have the same meaning for me as for most others.
I do like to receive a holiday card, but don’t expect or want much more. A card will tell me that I’m thought about by others even though I may not hear from them during the year. It makes me feel good to know that others do think about me from time to time. To me, it’s probably the best gift I could receive.
I don’t find holidays depressing, but I do find all the hype annoying. It’s everywhere. It makes living unbreathable. It almost demands that you get into some fake spirit or attitude and tries to force you to enjoy something that you might not be ready to do. It makes everything seem surreal.
I will spend the bulk of the money I spend for cards. I do enjoy making them and sending them out. I will shop very little (I hate to shop anyway) for the grandchildren who still believe in Santa and maybe have a party at my home for family and a few friends — an excuse to enterain. I love to entertain and I don’t need a holiday to do that. Holidays just give me an excuse.
This is just how I preceive holidays. Everyone is different and deserves the respect of being individual.
That’s a very apt passenger seat analogy.
I’m glad you think of those holiday meals with your family with fondness. I’m sure you have very limited good memories of those times.
Thanks for sharing these memories, it helps round out my understanding of how your history shaped you.
This comment is written in black and white. You can’t see my face nor can you hear the tone in my voice. So, let me tell ya what it is. It’s a straight comment with no annoyance nor anger involved. Just info about Denny’s, about companies finally realizing it’s better to just close down on holidays as well as about race relations in Indiana. I think when anyone talks about race its a highly charged subject but my comment I hope is read with the same “info only” manner in which it was written. So…here goes,
Denny’s has issues. LOL Check out the Wiki article talking about how in the 1990’s they were sued repeatedly because of discriminating against workers and guests.
This is across the country too. I spent time here, Tyler and Tampa probably equal amounts of time. I can tell you for sure that Indiana is backwards and slow when it comes to race and gender equality issues. In Tampa when I was younger people had the “keep your head down” mentality. In Tyler there were so few of us that it would be hard to say what mentality there was. The word “isms” came up a lot though. Race -isms is what they referred to. We were a quiet group in Tyler, kept to ourselves. My mother wasn’t there so I ate good home cooked meals, didn’t deal much w/ the public and didn’t go to school. Back here in Indiana things were violent and divided. As a matter of fact Indiana didn’t completely integrate their schools until around 1985. When I went to BD High School I did so on the day they bussed in some kids. The students rioted, threw stuff at the bus. It was a horrible day. I lived across the frikin street.
In elementary school in Greenwood, IN parents began pulling their students out of a private school because of the two black girls that attended. I think I can say w/ confidence when a person has racial issues, especially in Indiana. Indiana is after all the birth place of the KKK. We have more covert racial issues than out right in your face discrimination. In my opinion when it comes to both race and gender equality Indiana trails behind all the other states. We aren’t the “in your face” type when it comes to such things, not anymore. So as when it comes to attacks and things like that we don’t do that, we do it quietly. We won’t make a list of racially divided states because of it. But you can feel it. I can feel it in my neighborhood. I see it on the news rather slyly. In my opinion, unless there is some sort of line drawn, some sort of division people just aren’t happy. They need someone to point to explaining why they don’t have it all. That’s the best explanation for racism. They need someone to point to to blame their problems on.
As for your point about working on a holiday, yup, if I wanted to be w/ my family on a holiday and was forced to work I’d be a little bit annoyed. As I got older the number of open restaurants on holidays was fewer and fewer. We were left with Denny’s. I think companies are a little more understanding now, at least here in Indy they are. On TG this will be a ghost town. Employees I think kinda realized that employees that don’t show up make service pretty bad on holidays. It’s good business to close down otherwise the service could suffer.
later tater,
Aussie
I was going to mention that Denny’s has a very recent history of discriminating against certain customers and potential employees…you covered it pretty well with the added comment though. This is still an issue in my town…in California!! I won’t go to Denny’s…because of this issue. It infuriates me to be asked “what does she want?” in reference to my partner…I won’t put up with that kind of behavior from anyone. Now if I could just stand up for myself like that!
I guess I’m trailer trash because I absolutely love Red Lobster. I consider that eating high on the hog. Then again, as broke as I am I consider eating at Beau Jo’s Pizza high on the hog.
But if I was suddenly to get rich, I’d still love Red Lobster. You can take the trash out of the trailer, but I’d still be trailer trash. I’d just be rich trailer trash. I can live with that!