Running with the lemmings in the name of love

I'm no fan of holiday travel. With more than 100 million more people in the United States than there were when I started driving, any motor trip to or through even a moderately populated area is stressful. For major holidays, the percentage of the population on the move packs even more vehicles into the plumbing system. Each one is guided by the pilot's emotions as well as intellect.

The holidays themselves are all about emotion. For Thanksgiving, many people travel long distances to give a quick nod to gratitude before kicking off the Christmas shopping season in earnest. Major retailers have been pimping Christmas since October, but certain rituals still seem to have power. One is that Thanksgiving marks the real gateway to "the holiday season." There is no "Thanksgiving season." Anyone stuck preparing the meal will have been doing some planning, but the rest of us just get ourselves to the table and try to waddle away afterwards. It's a spike in everything: one hectic approach by any travel mode necessary, one feast, one hasty retreat to the routines of work or school for the few weeks until "the Christmas season" -- or (insert holiday here) -- intensifies steadily through modern echoes of solstice observances handed down through countless generations.

When I was a kid, my siblings and I knew that nothing was more important than Dad's job. He never missed a Thanksgiving or a Christmas, but he wasn't home for my birth, and I think he missed my older brother's, too.  He would go years without taking a vacation with us. He might or might not attend our activities, depending on the needs of God and country. The idea that Dad's job was the family's essential lifeline was common in the 1960s. It's interesting that today we see a lot of promotion of the idea that time with family is the highest value, while at the same time people are working longer hours for less money, and major employers are pushing further and further into what had been traditional holidays for everyone.

I remember when stores were closed on Thanksgiving. Forget the cranberry sauce? Tough shit. There's probably a recipe in the Joy of Cooking. Get busy.

Someone has always had to work on the holidays. Aside from the obvious, like the military forces guarding our freedom from -- in those days -- the commies, and police and firefighters, there were also the people providing the fun or the solemnity. Your local pastor is on duty, racking up billable hours. Places that might provide a festive, holiday-themed dining experience need kitchen staff and servers, and employees to keep the place clean. And let's not forget the hospital, for all of the potential mood wreckers that can come along on their own schedule with no regard for human desires for rest and sociability.

Working in the winter recreation business, I came to regard the holidays as a nuisance. They motivate the general public to think of leisure, and give them a block of time in which to pursue it, but they just added more items to my already crowded schedule. I took advantage of my family's tradition that your job is your top priority. It allowed me to beg off from the traffic jams and sleep deprivation of holiday travel with the legitimate excuse that my job didn't allow enough time to get there and back and be at my best.

The job grew less demanding with changes in the business that employs me. But I lose pay when I'm away, and the business suffers for the shortage in staff. If I had no family, I would not consider driving anywhere, let alone hours on the highway with thousands of other lemmings. However, the parents are definitely advanced in years, and they are traditional people. They don't ask for much, and this simple thing makes them happy. I'm never able to make it at Christmas, so here we are.

My family did not habitually pack up and go to see my grandparents at every holiday. If we happened to live near enough we would do the occasional Thanksgiving, Easter, or Christmas. Sometimes the grandparents might make the trip to us, but my mother's older brother lived right in their area and had four kids of his own, so we weren't the only option. We were such a moving target that we might be a three hour drive away for a couple of years, and then a 21-hour drive away for a couple. We might be to their north, in a land of ice and snow, or down at the bottom of the Florida peninsula. Or the tippy end of Texas, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico. So traveling or not traveling was on a case-by-case basis.

Life is always moment to moment, day to day. It becomes more obvious when a person is ill or old or both, but we are being hunted from the day that we are born. We live in the hope that what we consider good will continue, cultivating gratitude for what we have gotten away with. When possible, we bolster the comforting illusions of those we love.