Saturdays with Seniors: Cynthia’s Holiday Escape

Today’s guest blogger, Cynthia Jones.

I am pleased to introduce Cynthia Jones as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. After a long career in nursing and social work, Cynthia officially retired in 2013 and, until this past March, had been working part-time at City of Chicago senior centers and a residential facility for people with chronic mental illness. With so many Americans wondering how on earth they’ll celebrate the holidays without big gatherings this year, it was refreshing to hear from a caregiver who never liked big family parties in the first place – here’s Cynthia’s 2020 holiday essay:

by Cynthia Jones

I’ve never liked Thanksgiving. Actually, I’m not a big fan of holidays. As a kid, Thanksgiving meant having to dress up in “church” clothes and sit at dinner and be seen and not heard with a bunch of adults who ignored me after a few inane comments about how big I was getting.

They talked of weird things like who died or had surgery, the high cost of everything, the evils of Russia and communism and reminisced about the glory days of WWI and II.

As I got older, younger cousins joined the family. I was expected to sit at the “kids table” with them, cut up their food, clean up anything spilled, and entertain them so they wouldn’t interrupt the fascinating conversation the adults were having.

As a teen and young adult, I longed to spend the holiday with my friends, but they, too, were condemned to spend the day with older and younger relatives who we felt superior to. As a single young adult, I was tasked with driving three elderly grandparents to the dinner. This wouldn’t have been such an aggravation if they hadn’t started asking when I would be taking them home a half hour after we had arrived.

After I started working as a nurse, I discovered an awesome fringe benefit of the job: someone had to work on Thanksgiving!! I was always the first to volunteer. I felt so righteous telling my mom or grandmother, whoever was hosting dinner, how sorry I was to miss the family celebration. “Oh, you know,” I’d say with a sigh. “The patients in the ER need me.” How could they argue with that?

After I had a family of my own, I continued to work on Thanksgiving. That way I could be off on Christmas. It felt deliciously irreverent to order pizza or binge on White Castle sliders with my husband and children after working my Thanksgiving shift.

As years went by, I moved from working in hospitals to social service agencies and often had the day off. By this time my mother was widowed and said she could no longer entertain a large group.

So I became the reluctant Thanksgiving hostess for the extended family. I found I actually enjoyed the cooking — it kept me from having to participate in the same recurring conversation about the evils of communism and glory of World Wars.

As my kids became teens and young adults, I vowed not to make them hate Thanksgiving as I had. I encouraged them to invite friends for dinner, or leave to be with friends right after the meal. Having a different group each year was so enjoyable that I started inviting random friends myself.

With my children married now, sharing the holiday in recent years with in-laws has been fun…and interesting. This year, with COVID-19 rampant and dire warnings about holiday gatherings being super spreader events, my daughter and I cooked a big dinner together with the help of my three-year-old granddaughter. The only other guest? My son in law. It was an amazing day.