Thanksgiving, Unfiltered

I was talking with a friend over the weekend and we were comparing notes on our Thanksgivings. We both agreed it was not a Thanksgiving for the books. It was just alright. Nothing was wrong, but it was a Thanksgiving where it felt more like going through the motions than a milestone holiday. A good Thanksgiving has to earn that right. It has to have a vivid detail that evokes a memory or emotion. If it doesn’t, then it’s just meh. This Thanksgiving was meh. 

To be fair, this is rather rare. Most Thanksgivings have a feeling. Like the year we deep fried the turkey. The year the oven broke. The year Tyler brought home all his North Park roommates. The year Brett met my family and Melinda said, “You wait. She’s going to marry that boy.” 

As many of you know, writing is one of my favorite hobbies. Like any person trying to get better at something, this takes work. I don’t just sit at my laptop and string words into sentences. It’s more technical than that. I spend time and energy learning about composition, language, and structure. This isn’t something I do in isolation. I have a writing coach. We meet once a month and talk about everything from when to use past perfect tense to the existential meaning of themes, character arcs, foreshadowing, and imperfect plot holes. 

As an example, we’ll go over a writing lesson: how do you start a story?

*Spans hands out as if offering a deeply profound revelation* Something Happens.

Every story you’ve ever read (that is properly structured) starts at the moment something happens. A phone rings. Her plane lands. The faucet breaks. You hooked up with the hot guy from the bar the night before starting your surgical internship at Seattle Grace Hospital only to find out the hot guy is your neurosurgery attending. Whoops.

No matter how small, grand, or unfortunate, something happens. An event sets more events in motion that pull you like a thread through the story. 

Where the author starts the story (often called the drop-in point), matters. Grey’s Anatomy didn’t start with Meredith and Derek flirting in the bar. We didn’t see them order drinks. We didn’t see them leave together. We didn’t see them get to know each other (biblically speaking). Instead, we start with Patrick Dempsey waking up on the floor, hugging a pillow. We didn’t start the story at the catalytic event but well after. Shonda Rhimes, who I believe is one of the best storytellers of our generation, knew where to drop us into their story and it wasn’t with a meet-cute.

Back to Thanksgiving. If I tell you the story of the Thanksgiving I spent like a Natalie Imbruglia lyric—cold and ashamed, bound and broken on the floor—that’s bleak. If I tell you the story of the Thanksgiving my dog ate the mashed potatoes, that’s funny. Two stories. Two little windows into Thanksgiving memories.

Except they’re the same Thanksgiving. Same day. Different drop-in points. Something happens, events ensue. In one version it’s a mental breakdown. In the other version, I might be doting on my dog a little too much (guilty as charged). The catalyst for both stories, though, is neither of those events. The catalyst was a Thanksgiving morning where things fell apart, people yelled at each other, and it ended in disaster. Hence, crying on the bathroom floor. But four hours later, after a shower, a nap, and a Bettany Hughes BBC documentary, the day was salvaged by Barley in a bowtie eating mashed potatoes. 

Something happens. An event occurs. The story structure begins.

In one of my PR classes in undergrad, one of my favorite professors said, “One word I wish we could eliminate from the profession entirely is ‘spin.’ It implies we are misrepresenting reality. That isn’t the point of public relations.” 

I agree that in most cases “spin” is a bad tactic. However, I think sometimes spin gets a bad rap. Spin doesn’t mean deceiving invested publics. Spin is simply another word for moving the drop-in point. This is what creates memories. This is what makes a story wonderful or dull. This is the secret technique of being a writer. People don’t need every endless detail of what happened. Something happened, and that’s the whole reason a story occurs in the first place. But the story starts when the thread is pulled away from the minutia and spun into relatable truth: sometimes holidays are just OK.

The entire, big, long story isn't quite so simple. Bogged down with details, emotions, and human fragility, it’s bathed in nuance. On Thanksgiving, Husband Dearest sanded and painted our mudroom lockers. So sweet. So nice. What a cute little project.

He did not, however, remove our shoes, bags, and coats from the mudroom area nor did he put up plastic sheeting or a drop cloth. He spent the day sanding. And painting. And…please see where I am going with this. 

AKA the catalytic event. 

Finding out my perfect Thanksgiving attire was newly devoid of matching shoes due to paint splatter was too much. I stripped off my Thanksgiving outfit, went to get into the shower to have a good cry, but instead laid on the cold, hard bathroom floor sobbing like an unstable adolescent. 

This is a shameful story. An embarrassing story. An awful story. A story that doesn’t deserve a Thanksgiving memory. House is filthy. Favorite shoes DOA. I can’t move forward. Panicked, angry, and overwhelmed, I fell apart.

This story doesn’t make me look good. It doesn’t make B look good. It doesn’t make Thanksgiving look like a cozy event. But it’s real, and it’s what happened. Void of spin, that’s the story.

When I told my best friend this story—admitting my meh Thanksgiving was actually dysfunctional, not forgettable—she sighed. She had a martini balancing effortlessly in her left hand. Her hair was perfect. Her makeup was perfect. Her outfit was perfect. Her nails were perfect. Her poise was perfect. My superstar bestie, who has the grace of Jackie O., looked me dead in the eye and said dryly, “I wish that’s how I spent my Thanksgiving.”

“I’m sorry, you what?”

“I wanted to cry in the bathroom on Thanksgiving, but I couldn’t because I had a house full of people.”

OK, but, like, this wasn’t a good Thanksgiving. This was a let-me-forget-it-soon Thanksgiving. This was the Thanksgiving where things happened, end of story. The drop-in point cannot be that B forgot to move my shoes before painting the mudroom. The drop-in point has to have a better spin than that!

Except Professor Penning was right. We do our invested publics an injustice when we aren’t transparent about reality. If my best friend wasn’t horrified to hear about my emotional composure snapping like a twig, perhaps the most relatable part of the Thanksgiving saga is the ugly part. Maybe more people than I think are sitting around a table wishing they could be crying in the bathroom.

In fiction, this is a given. Start with the outlandish fallout of *something happening* and weave it into the meet-cute, the main conflict, or the mystery yet to unfold. For example, my current rom-com in progress starts with the FMC (female main character) and MMC (male main character) standing in the same aisle at a home improvement store. He makes a comment. She makes a comment back. He’s snarky and condescending. She’s impatient and annoyed. In an attempt to end the pointless debate, she grabs a can of spray paint and goes ham on his t-shirt. Meet-cute? Yeah, sure, if an impulsive graffiti frenzy qualifies as “cute.” 

In real life, spray painting a stranger in Home Depot is as offensive as dripping globs of Benjamin Moore paint on sequin-embossed Betsey Johnson shoes—don’t do it and expect it to go well. 

But we aren’t characters in a rom-com. There isn’t one plot. One conflict. One storyline. Things are happening all the time. Big and small. Public and private. Independent and intertwined. Real and imagined. Overwhelming and underwhelming. Personal and relational. When something happens while we’re trying to problem-solve every other thing that has already happened, it gets messy. Yes, the ruined shoes were my catalytic event, but so were ten other things my brain was trying to resolve. That’s how real life goes.

But even in their differences, life and art are connected in ways we can’t always explain. Why did I start a story with FMC going nuts with Rust-Oleum on MMC? Probably because at one point or another, I think we’ve all had that moment. We haven’t spray painted some jerk’s shirt out of revenge, but we’ve wanted to. We haven’t spent a Thanksgiving on the bathroom floor, but we’ve wanted to. We just don’t mention those parts of our own stories. We let ourselves feel like falling apart is shameful and embarrassing because we tell ourselves this never happens in real life. This never happens to stable people. This never happens in normal families. This never happens to people who have their stuff together.

Oh, I assure you, it does. (And BTW, none of us have our stuff together.) 

So if this resonates with you but you had to put on a brave face for Thanksgiving, feel free to consider my Thanksgiving your emotional drop-in point. We can call it an exercise in artistic reinterpretation. A fictitious retelling of true events. A choose-your-own-adventure-after-the-fact. Yes, I spent the day crying on the bathroom floor. If you want to pretend you did too, I’m cool with that.

~ Tricia

(Also, I wrote the spray-paint-t-shirt chapter six weeks ago, way before the Thanksgiving debacle of 2024. Clearly I have some strong feelings about spilled paint.)