The worst Thanksgiving ever

I think we can all agree that 2020 is a colossal dumpster fire. There has been little fun or joy to be had. We’ve all been struggling to get by and find moments that are less dumpstery than usual -- to maybe find a fleeting dance with joy. But mostly, things just suck. With Thanksgiving this week, it promises to be another in a long list of major bummers. The CDC has told us that we need to stay home -- and staying home is really the only safe way to get through this holiday. My husband and I still haven’t figured out what, if anything, we’ll do to mark the day as any different from any of the others in the past nine months. Still, in the interest of perspective, I don’t think it will compare with The Worst Thanksgiving Ever. 

It may be hard to believe, but staying home alone and doing nothing is actually preferable to one particular Thanksgiving my family had in the mid-90s. I was away at college in Ohio, so travel was a necessity to see my family, regardless of the holiday. Someone (I honestly don’t know who is to blame for this harebrained idea) thought it would be a good idea for us to meet up with our family in Tennessee for a mini family reunion. This included my grandparents and dad’s siblings (and their families) who lived in Baltimore, as well as the extended Tennessee branch of my dad’s family. The plan was to meet in Nashville, then drive to Gatlinburg for a long weekend in the Smoky Mountains. Sounds idyllic, no? A weekend of Family Fun! I’ll bet you didn’t know that Nashville is nowhere near Gatlinburg, even though they are in the same (very long) state. We literally could have driven from Nashville to Alabama, Arkansas, or Kentucky faster than we’d get to Gatlinburg. Apparently, nobody in my family knew this either (and the ones who may have known didn’t care).

It’s probably a good sidebar to note here that years prior, we had done a family trip (same cast of characters) to Gatlinburg that had been all highjinx and hilarity and actual Family Fun! We rented adjoining condos at the top of a mountain and the views were gorgeous. Our Tennessee family took us to every possible place in the Smoky Mountains where a person could shop. There was a country ham that stunk up the entire condo block. There were games and giggles and tons of fun. There was an eternity spent in the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum, much to my mother’s chagrin. I think I even fed a bear a carrot. We had every reason to believe that this trip would be more of the same, and so off we embarked on a great family adventure.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I flew into Nashville and Cuz (one of my dad’s cousins, natch) picked me up from the airport. He took me on a lovely driving tour of the city, pointing out landmarks and other things. We then met everyone (there were easily 25 of us) for dinner at Cracker Barrel (pronounced, in the vernacular, “Cracka Berl”) before spending the evening walking around the Opryland Hotel. This was the first in what would be a very bizarre series of events. At the time, Opryland must’ve been one of the biggest hotels in the world. I had certainly never seen anything like it in my life (to this day, I’m not sure I can compare it to anything I’ve ever seen). It even had a full forest inside the atrium, with a stream and footbridges. And, I don’t know if there was a pageant in town that night or what, but you have never seen so much big hair and so many ball gowns in your life. Everyone was dressed to promenade, and promenade they did. The only thing missing was Bert Parks. We were transfixed (and underdressed).

The next morning, we set out after breakfast (at -- you guessed it --Cracka Berl) and loaded up in a caravan of cars headed for Gatlinburg. It was at this point we learned that it was a distance of more than 200 miles across the entire state, in a whole other time zone! On Thanksgiving. On a normal day, it would take us four hours or so. On Thanksgiving, who knows...we were about to find out. (Incidentally, we could have all flown into Knoxville and driven an hour to Gatlinburg...but why make things easy? Where’s Family Fun in that!)

We were no more than an hour down the road when at least one of my cousins got carsick. So, we pulled over. And waited. Fortunately, my dad had made the extremely wise decision to rent his own car for our family of four, in lieu of riding in the larger family van with the Baltimore relatives (hereafter, the Barf Mobile). This scenario played out several more times over the course of the neverending afternoon. Did I mention, Family Fun! We stopped, again, midday for lunch at...Cracka Berl, allowing more time for vomiting and leg stretching. It was around this point when my immediate family decided we were done with the caravan and we were just going to get there, hell or high water. We were definitely already in hell, high water TBD.

By then, it was starting to get dark, so we left the Barf Mobile and friends behind and hauled ass the last leg of the journey. Somehow, we managed to get up the mountain to the condos where we were staying around dinner time. Because we had given up on the caravan, we were ahead of everyone else. And, then it hit us. Because it was Thanksgiving, there weren’t any restaurants open in tiny little Gatlinburg (nor a Cracka Berl to be found). We didn’t have groceries, so there was to be no turkey dinner. Our last meal had been hours earlier. Nobody had thought about what we would have for Thanksgiving dinner. So we pulled out the phone book (‘member those?) and looked up pizza delivery. And that’s how we ended up eating lukewarm Dominos pizza for Thanksgiving dinner that year. More Family Fun!

Hours later, our other family members showed up and realized they had no Thanksgiving dinner ahead of them, either. And that’s how they ended up eating Dominos pizza for Thanksgiving dinner that year. 

Sure, we were all together. But we were cranky, uncomfortable, bored, frustrated, and hungry for most of the day (and some of us were vomiting). Nobody ever wanted to see Cracka Berl again. There had been none of the promised Family Fun! Some might argue that, to some degree, that’s what every family experiences on Thanksgiving (and perhaps it is). But that ridiculous, endless, vomit-filled road trip was truly the worst Thanksgiving ever. 

(To be fair, the rest of the weekend was at least marginally better than Thanksgiving day. I don’t think anyone threw up the rest of the time we were there. Though I have mostly blocked out the entire trip -- except for lunch at Ronnie Milsap’s restaurant in downtown Gatlinburg where a wedding was going on around us. Let’s just say, it did not go down in the historic register as one of the great family vacations of all time, and it was made worse because we didn’t even get to go to Dollywood, which was closed for the season.)

This year, when I can’t be with my family or even my adopted “framily” and so many of us will be marking the day alone, I’ll be thinking back to that awful year and rejoice in the fact that I won’t be traveling for hours across the length of Tennessee only to have bad pizza for dinner. And so, from my (quarantined) house to your (hopefully, also quarantined) house, I want to wish you the most mundane and restorative Thanksgiving you can muster. I hope you find a moment or two of joy, however fleeting. I hope you eat something you love. I hope you don’t vomit. And most of all, I hope that we will all be in a better place than Cracka Berl, the Barf Mobile, Gatlinburg and -- merciful heavens -- 2020 next year.