Bridget Callahan is Your Best Friend

Thanksgiving is a weird safe holiday. There isn't any religious stuff or political stuff to alienate people. We don't have Thanksgiving parties. Instead we spend all day at home, smelling things cook, eating crackers, and in my family's case, sitting around on our various laptops silently orbiting around each other until dinner. Which is at normal dinner time, not 1 or 2, I think because there is no way my family could get everything together before 12pm and why would we want to? We have the day off work.

I like the whole all or nothing aesthetic of Thanksgiving. There's this feeling of eat it all now, as if tomorrow there is no possibility of us starving or not having a job or being homeless. It's less "I'm so grateful for this" and more "I have utter confidence in this".

Which is what I was thinking about yesterday while driving. There was the predictable story about the new cabinet picks on the radio and I was contemplating the pure middleness of our new president, when I realized that all this "hope" we were sold, and ate with the vigor of a butterball turkey wasn't really hope. I don't think any of us thought he was going to get into office and suddenly all our liberal fantasies would come true. But we'll trade away extremity for what Obama is really selling, confidence. I love driving around, thinking about politics and elections in Lebanon and inflation in Ghana, and having confidence in the person who runs my country, who decides what move we make and what kind of player we are. It means I can listen and think about these things with actual interest again, instead of crippling abject terror.

So Thanksgiving is also about confidence. Confidence in our money, and our family, and our country, and ourselves. Maybe we sometimes make the wrong moves, or the answer the wrong questions, but in the end it will work out, because we're us. And look at all this food we have!

Then tomorrow we'll go back to doubting and eating leftovers.