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Contemplating the holidays

Posted by Jeff Oloizia on Nov. 25, 2009 | 1 comment

Two years ago, I spent Christmas away from home for the first time.  For the first time in my life, there was no Christmas dinner with the family, no watching re-runs of A Christmas Story on TV, and no Christmas Day mass at too-early-in-the-morning.  There were no leftovers, no football discussions with my grandfather, no football period.  There weren’t even candy canes.  Shocking, obviously.  What there was, was a small dinner with friends, far too much of Wham’s “Last Christmas,” and me eating half an advent calendar’s worth of chocolate in front of the glow of my laptop.  Not a terrible way to spend one’s Christmas, but not entirely memorable either.

This year, thanks to an ill-timed touch rugby tournament in Tokyo, I’ll be “missing” Thanksgiving for the first time as well.  Whereas in past years I’ve attended dinners hosted by American friends or incredibly kind teachers with a flair for cooking foreign foods, this year I will be trading Stovetop for scrums and turkey for trys.  While I’m admittedly not thrilled about this, I can’t say I’m devastated either.  So as not to be taken the wrong way, allow me to explain.

Yesterday, for reasons unknown to me, I was asked to teach a lesson on Halloween to a class of seventh graders.  With relative ease I was able to tap into my own childhood Halloween experiences, and after a quick trip to the supermarket I was able to faithfully reproduce what I will call the “reach in the bucket and feel the cold pasta meant to be internal organs” game.  While it was easy to teach the students about witches and vampires and trick-or-treating, I found it far more difficult to try and explain the holiday’s meaning.  A quick look at internet resources suggested that I should compare our Halloween with the Japanese Obon festival, in which the dead are observed and celebrated, but I thought better of that.  In the end, the students were left grasping grape “eyeballs” but little else.

Which leads me to Thanksgiving, which, it turns out is something I can teach.  It seems being thankful is a pretty universal idea, and for students expected to stand in unison and thank their teachers at the end of each lesson, this concept isn’t such a stretch.  While my Japanese colleagues might have no idea what stuffing or yams are or why in the world we’d want to eat them, they clearly have no issue with giving thanks.  And thankfully, neither do I.

This, obviously, is the important part of the holiday.  So while I’d love to be home this Thanksgiving, I’ll be more than happy sitting down in my beanbag on Sunday night, watching a two day old rip of the Packers-Lions game on my computer, and thinking about all the things I’m thankful for this year.  Namely, my health, the humbling privilege of being able to travel, and a wonderful family back home.  Materially it may not look a lot like Thanksgiving, but conceptually I think it’s all there.

Not a eureka moment by any means, but something I’ll be thinking about in the coming days nonetheless.  If you’re reading this and you’re sitting at the Oloizia family dinner table this Thursday, thank you.  And to everyone else, Happy Thanksgiving.