11-25-2024 4:18am

Doug Hales Redefines Thanksgiving

Lesley Misko Editor

Doug Hales was born and raised in the Boyertown area — Perkiomenville, specifically. Class of 2004! In the 20 years since, most of his family has remained in the area, but Doug has proven to be much more of a nomad. These days, he works as a copywriter and Creative Director for an advertising agency. He currently resides in Miami, Florida, but tries to make it back home to Boyertown at least once a year.

by Doug Hales

For a lot of my adult life, I have had what you might call a “no, thanks” attitude when it comes to the holiday season.

Go home for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas? No, thanks. (I do live quite far from my family, in my defense.)

Spend all day cooking a turkey? No, thanks.

If I’m honest, while my mother went all-out for Thanksgiving, her cooking left much to be desired. The turkey was dry; the cranberry sauce was canned. The candied yams were just plain, unseasoned sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top. And the pie was store-bought.

So, even as a kid, I wasn’t wild about the day, and I was a little confused about why everyone else seemed to be. I don’t have any nostalgia for the flavors.

When I became a grownup, I left Boyertown and moved to California with my (now ex -)husband a week after graduating college, which presented its own barriers to doing the holidays “like everybody else.” He very emphatically did not want to visit his family in New Jersey — both because enduring holiday airport chaos was not his thing, and because enduring meals with two parents who wanted him to stop being gay and “find the right girl” was also very much not his thing.

Since he didn’t want to go home to his family, for better or worse, I didn’t want to press the issue by going home to my (accepting and welcoming) family, who lived just 60 miles away from his, because that would open the door to the inevitable “Well, why don’t you come see us too?” questions. So we did the “orphan Thanksgiving” thing in California each year instead, either getting an invite to a friend’s home or just cooking something smaller for ourselves.

So, I lost the softness of ritual and tradition with Thanksgiving, too. Even though I do have fond memories of some of those years, it was always a scramble to figure out our plans, and the sense of comfort in familiarity became a distant memory. By the end of my twenties, the only “tradition” I was consistently observing was to sit with a growing sense of guilt that I wasn’t “doing it right.” The holidays, I mean. Ironically, the last Thanksgiving I spent with my ex-husband was also the day I first realized I had to leave him, and I stayed up very late that night, alone in my living room, grappling with what that would mean for me.

Once we got divorced, I went on my own journey to figure out who I was without him. You know, as 50% of us do. My version was to go backpacking for an entire year, all over the world, and when November came around again, I happened to spend that Thanksgiving Day in Tokyo, Japan. I vividly remember sitting in the restaurant on the top floor of my capsule hotel, staring out at the Tokyo skyline from the umpteenth story window, wearing a yukata, watching millions of people not celebrating Thanksgiving, and enjoying the most perfect bowl of katsudon. Not a morsel of turkey, stuffing, pie, or candied yams in sight. Just a breaded pork cutlet over rice — and, finally, a generous helping of peace.

I realized it was probably the happiest Thanksgiving I had ever had as an adult — because there was no weight to bear about what the day “should’ve” been. There was nothing to compare it against. And that’s when it hit me: Maybe Thanksgiving doesn’t have to “be” anything. Maybe it’s okay to remake it however I want to. And… maybe it can even be fun?

In the years since, I’ve started a new tradition: doing the day with my best friend. Nowadays, he lives in Austin, Texas, and I live in Miami, Florida. He, too, has a history of not wanting to spend the holiday with family, for his own reasons. So we take turns visiting each other’s cities, booking a table at a very fancy restaurant each year to see how renowned chefs like Marcus Samuelsson interpret Thanksgiving dinner, and we generally enjoy redefining the day for ourselves.

And hey, that’s what I’m most thankful for as an American, anyway: the opportunity to redefine myself and my life, over and over. What’s more American than blazing your own trail and believing anything is possible?