“Happy” Trigger Day, to All Who Celebrate.
The latest installment in a blog series on my continuing practice of decolonization as a chronically ill, queer, single mama and artist, trying to survive The Game of Capitalism, in Camas.
Should you, too, find the mental gymnastics required to navigate this genocidal society dictate you need Nordic-inspired holiday knits ala Star Stable Online stat, check out your local Goodwill. They’ve got rows of holiday jammies at a fraction of their new price out right now. If you’re savvy, your spidey sense might guide you to your missing match, like it did me. BDS in cozy style!
As I type, my Mumsy’s holiday-recipe vermouth roast turkey sits on her (now my) teal Metlox Poppytrail plate beside me at my standing workstation: My dinner. The stuffing is my favorite. Late hubby added the marshmallow yams as a staple; cranberry sauce rounds it out. I’m taking a break from my usual sugar-free LongCovid GAPS diet for this sweetfest. My teens and I have had a run of lovely family days this vacation week, as they’re home from school; so tonite, daughter is out with her boyfriend, while son is waiting for his friends to hop online and play Minecraft with him. And I’m writing this blog.
My childhood, classically US-American winter holidays were all delicate spinning-glass tabletop candelabras and gold-rimmed Lenox on mahogany wood tables over slate floors, Waterford glasses holding Mom and Dad’s cocktail-hour self-medication (/therapy). It was beautiful, and tense, but the food was nummy, and the haunting Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas records felt sacred to me in a way I couldn’t explain. Thanksgiving was the gateway to Christmas, when we’d survey the pile as tall as childhood me of Nordstrom boxes (that never seemed to bring that deep satisfaction it promised) to the evening sounds of Fox News and Masterpiece Theater. One year, I was chosen to play the part of “Mary” in my elementary school Christmas pageant. This may or may not have gone to my head. In any case, the colonial empire indoctrination I’d grown up with was firmly in place. I didn’t know socially acceptable alcoholism was trauma. We played our roles well. We said “Thanksgiving” and “Christmas” at normal conversational volume. It was what I knew; I didn’t know to question it.
Now my kids are 15 and 18. We have been on our own since they were 2 and 5. Their Da died the day after Thanksgiving, 2012. He’d just declared his retirement from 30 years in the USPS, who responded, “If you call in sick one more time, we’ll deny you your retirement.” That’s the USPS M.O., I later discovered, after starting a Facebook group called “USPS Widows.” Death by Bullying is not uncommon for United States Postal Service employees. Elspeth got sick Monday; he caught it Tuesday; he was going into heart failure Thursday. Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, 2012, he was dead.
So yeah, this “holiday” is already triggering for us three.
In this, the last year my oldest will be home full time, I have just decided to finally end our health insurance, so I can afford to heat the house for winter and feed us (that ought to go far to keep us well, right?). We are a chronically ill family in end-stage capitalism and the sharp rise of fascism. I feel keenly the weight of the economic class in which we have landed. I am not just blindly following the traditions (or systems) with which I was raised. I am questioning everything, now.
To that end, I’ve been reading Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” published in 1972, the year after I was born. Rodney, from Guyana, asserts, “In the final analysis, perhaps the most important principle of colonial education was that of capitalist individualism... . In Africa, both the formal school system and the informal value system of colonialism destroyed social solidarity and promoted the worst form of alienated individualism without social responsibility.”
Individualism of a sort was forced upon my little fam when my daughter was most injured-ill from TBI, my son and I more ill with LongCovid, but we embraced it to survive. The ableist, performative evangelical Christian communities they’d grown up with almost supernaturally vanished, so quickly were they gone. Martial arts people, church people, horse people, it was all the same: “Family” ended when accountability became an issue. It’s too long a story for this space and time, but I even lost my favorite local coffee shop, which eschewed masking early on in the pandemic (no, the unicorns-and-rainbows explanatory note to the community didn’t soften that blow). If you love coffee like I do, you get my pain.
The kids grew up on horses, too. That door closed, we discovered holidays on Star Stable Online. It was a lovely distraction from our suddenly isolated lives, and brought us closer together in a time when our bodies were not happy places in which to live. In Star Stable, soothing instrumental music plays to horse hoofbeats falling on beautifully constructed digital lands. We rode together and played together, earning rewards to spend on fun prizes like fanciful digital horses and Nordic winter-themed knit outfits for our characters. When we couldn’t afford Christmas presents for each other, Star Stable had 25 days of presents for each of us. It was, actually, lovely.
For our little family of three, every holiday is a chance to celebrate: We have survived. Not genocide, like so many others are staring down right now; no, nothing like that, but … a bit. Preparing for this meal (and a welcome break from cooking thanks to leftovers) with brioche buns purchased at New Seasons, our pink-haired checker asked,
“Are you ready for Thursday?”
That was a lightbulb moment for me. Thursday! I love that! It’s just the fourth Thursday in November. Yes, it’s also that pesky anniversary of my kids’ Da’s death. I can never see this holiday without that association, even if I am ultimately relieved not to have to jockey the captaining of our ship with that hawt, hot mess anymore.
“Thanksgiving” is also the propaganda cover of the heinous genocide this nation is built upon. And it’s the National Day of Mourning, rightly commemorating said (continuing) genocide and rewriting our false history of it, recognized since 1970 (the year before I was born). How unbelievably triggering this holiday must be to Native Americans.
But, it’s also just … Thursday.
We have the week off, and my family survives. That is cause for celebration. I tried the old Christmas records: They just made me angry. But with a little help from Goodwill, I’m dressing the Nordic-reindeer, warm and cozy part. Though we can’t afford heating oil yet, we’re lucky enough to have a free firewood source - this year, anyway. These jammies will help. And they make me smile. And joy is resistance, right?
A belated Happy Thursday, everyone.
#NationalDayofMourning #Thanksgiving #ComplicatedGrief #TheGameofCapitalism
Charity Feb lives and writes on The Herbalist’s Homestead, a progressive little hobby farm rebelliously tucked into the southwest hills of Camas, Washington, USA. She photographs portraits in her home studio and environs under the business name Portraits of Connection by Charity Feb.