the parade
on celebrating nothing
We did nothing for Thanksgiving, but we made a big annoying deal about it. It’s very hard to actually do nothing on a holiday; nearly everyone I have ever heard describe doing nothing for a big holiday was actually describing doing something for it. Ritual and event hold on very hard to being ritual and event. It’s too muscular to get even just one day out of the grasp of memory and tradition, let alone a day that already has notions about itself. These structures hold even if you don’t want to acknowledge the structures. Every holiday wants to sit you down and talk to you about the past, and each day is trying so hard to be a portal to all the other versions of that day. Doing nothing about it is still doing something. Just getting to the same point on the calendar again is a tradition.
One important Thanksgiving tradition is saying that you know Thanksgiving is bad before going ahead and celebrating it anyway. I know that Thanksgiving is bad, rotten at its heart and needlessly stressful on its surface, but, traditionally, I love it anyway. I cook too much, and invite too many people over, and make too many plans, and feel some big swelling feeling about abundance and crowded tables while stress-crying over the behavior of potatoes. But this year, through a mile-long collision of logistics and happenstance, both Thomas and I ended up with no real Thanksgiving obligations. We were overjoyed about it, about having a year off, a day to stop and look around and catch our breath and take naps on the couch. We’d made big plans to do nothing, and I was excited about it like a child is excited about Christmas.
In California, where I grew up, everyone was always making a big deal out of doing nothing; everyone was always celebrating a holiday by making a huge production out of not celebrating it. I went to high school in a small town that was in a lot of ways actually a big city. In the small town, people used to say “anything anyone does here for more than two years in a row is a tradition.” When I was a kid I thought that meant that the town was a very small town. Now I understand that that’s actually what happens in big cities, where everybody comes to get away from tradition, and from family, and then is so white-knuckle and dilated-pupil desperate to get themselves some traditions and some family.
I got to New York as a teenager and it almost immediately was winter and everyone wanted to make plans that they had no reason to make. People I had met maybe a month before were so eager to establish tradition and call one another family, and I was one of them, just as eager to make nothing mean something. We wanted so much to get those big words around any meal or event or excursion or mediocre party that happened more than two years in a row, or happened once but seemed like it maybe could happen again. We were all trying so hard to bend the holidays into a shape we could love. I’m still trying; I never stopped and I never quite succeeded, because no one ever does. I did nothing for Thanksgiving this year not because I didn’t want to have a holiday but because I wanted one so badly, because I wanted to stop and stand still in the middle of the day until it cohered around me.
When I say we did nothing, of course I mean we watched the parade. The Macy’s Day Parade (that’s its real name, because the real name of the Thanksgiving parade is whatever your grandmother used to call it when she watched it on TV) starts two blocks from my bedroom. On Thanksgiving the first year after we moved here, I threw open the window to hear the slightest delay between the noise outside and the noise of the same event live on my TV inside. I did this because it was a new thing, and then I did it every year after that, because I had done it the year before.
We did nothing for Thanksgiving, except that we did this, because we always do this. We threw open the windows early in the morning and put the parade on TV, and listened to the very slight delay between the sound of the parade outside and the sound of it on the screen. The thing happened at the same time as itself, but we could hear the tiny gap between reality and reality. I guess that’s what tradition is, too: doing something and pointing at doing something, with the slightest gap between the thing and itself. I’ve never explained this well; I can’t believe I get to live here, right at the stupid heart of the stupid world. I didn’t do anything for Thanksgiving except feel this way again, grateful and like a fraud about it, which is a thing I feel every year on Thanksgiving.
We used to throw a leftovers party every year two days after Thanksgiving. By “every year” I mean I think we threw this party four or maybe three times ever. So, like I said, we used to throw it every year. Throwing a party is always a little nerve-wracking, but throwing a party that you’ve claimed is a tradition is terrifying, like drawing a boat on a piece of paper and then having to row that boat across an ocean. People have to believe in a party for it to happen, and if you tell anyone that they have to believe in a party you immediately ruin the party and no one believes in it.
Anyway, everyone used to come over and and bring their leftovers and put them on the table with our leftovers. Everyone used to put their coats on the bed and then the cats would sleep on the coats and then later everyone would go in the bedroom and gather around the bed and bother the cats. We all used to play a game with index cards and drawing pictures on them and sometimes the game was really fun and sometimes I talked too much about how fun the game was going to be and it kind of ruined the game. There’s no way to know if leftovers are going to be good; it has nothing to do with what the food was like in its first incarnation. There’s no way to know if a party is going to be good, or if it’s going to be a disaster, and if you throw it in your own home you have to stay for the whole thing no matter what, but on the other hand you don’t have to go outside. The night before Thanksgiving this year I lay awake and listened to the risers being set up for the parade. It was the most hideous sound, metal shrieking over metal again and again and again at one in the morning. I lay there and thought here I am at the center of the world, here it is, it’s really happening. It was the same thing that happens every year. I couldn’t sleep. It felt like a holiday.
There’s something a little bit desperate about every tradition, wanting it too much, caring too much, raising your hand and making the straining-raising-your-hand-in-class noise. The week before Thanksgiving, walking home, I stopped at corner on 72nd and saw that the city’s decorations were up, big clumsy stars strung over the intersection. On the steps in front of the museum, the dinosaurs made of fir tree branches might already be assembled, wearing their red bows and forever holding their shiny wrapped gifts out to one another. Going to look for the museum’s Christmas dinosaurs is a tradition, and so is small talk about family and travel, and so is the early dark, and so is complaining about it. The big stores put up their window displays and it’s a tradition to go and look at them but it’s also a tradition to forget to go and look at them until they’ve already been taken down.
I’ve never gone to see the big tree at Rockefeller Center, or gone skating at any of the seasonal rinks, but sometimes we go see It’s A Wonderful Life at Film Forum and sometimes we say we’ll do that and don’t, and sometimes I accidentally get lost in the middle of the Union Square holiday market and make the same stupid joke about having to fight a minotaur at the center of it. Up at Columbia, the trees at the campus entrance at 116th will be wrapped in lights. Essie will make candy and cookies for everyone on her list and batch them into bright little boxes. At least one friend will have a holiday party and send an email about it too late, after everybody on the email already has other plans, and Mary from Judson will invite me and Thomas to a party on Christmas Day and we’ll wish we could go and say that we’ll go next year, knowing that there’s no way we can go next year unless the unthinkable occurs. Vicki and I will go and sit in a bar that’s done up in tinsel for the holidays and talk about whatever we missed from the rest of the long year. The big corporate offices will put up faceless decorated trees, and along Madison and Park Avenue, impossibly formal parties will glimmer and taunt out of the windows of all the horrible old clubs and enormous homes.
On the grand scale of it, there’s a lot to dislike about the holidays: The worry and the obligation and the money, the truncated and frantic schedule for any kind of work, the airports and train stations, and the tourists clogging up the subway entrances. But down past that, nearer to the core of whatever this season is, are all the small traditions, all the things that somebody once did two or even three years in a row. Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, knots of older teens arrived in my neighborhood, home from boarding school or from college. They stood around awkwardly on street corners, took up space in the CVS, and crowded the doors at the bad wannabe dive bars on Amsterdam. Everybody was hanging out with their ex-girlfriend and everybody was hanging out with everybody else’s ex-girlfriend. Everybody slid the very short distance back to real childhood, glutting themselves on gossip, talking about how much they had changed but really hoping that everything was just the same as last year. I know the holidays are here because when the boarding school kids arrive in my neighborhood it feels like it means something but I can’t say what it means or why it matters, except that it happens every year. I get my winter coat out and I wait for it to snow, even though it isn’t likely to snow until January, or at all.
I know the boarding school kids are back because over the weekend I could hear the remnants of the parties they threw in their parents’ houses spilling out onto the street. It’s party season, I guess, although no one is talking about party season. I feel the same way about it that I did about Thanksgiving, in that I want very much to celebrate it by doing nothing at all. Parties, like holidays, are desperate, but that’s what I like about parties, and about the holidays. Nothing is friendlier or brighter than loneliness, and people mostly find each other because they’re desperate, despite whatever story they might tell about it later. I’ve never really liked anyone who wasn’t desperate in some way. I think it’s so cute when people say “no new friends;” I have never for one single moment in my life not wanted more friends. I have never not wanted to celebrate anything; I have never not wanted to go to a party, even when I want to stay home. I want everyone to come over and bring their leftovers and put them on the table with the other leftovers and I want that even when I don’t want to see any other people or eat anything or cook anything. I wanted to do nothing for Thanksgiving because that was the only thing I thought would feel like the holiday, the only way to make the day resemble itself. I want the parade on the television and the parade outside my window, which are the same parade, to sound like the same parade.
After the parade, we did nothing. We watched the dog show and then we watched the World Cup and then we watched a movie that had nothing to do with anything except wanting to watch a movie. Brazil scored the single most beautiful goal I have ever seen and Thomas took a nap and we heated up some of the takeout we had ordered with friends to eat in our separate homes. I shopped on my phone and didn’t buy anything and later we ate pie for dinner until we felt sick and then we went to bed early. On the corner outside, the tree-sellers who had come down from Canada set up their Christmas tree stands. Somewhere, the air smelled like pine trees and cider. Somewhere, someone deflated all the balloons, and somewhere, someone else took an aimless walk in the cold just to get out of the house. I lay awake listening to the parade set-up being taken down and loaded onto trucks. None of it mattered, and none of it was necessary, except that all of it had happened before. I went to sleep without setting an alarm. It was a holiday.
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you make it all legible and i'm very thankful for your words.
you are a gift.