No Time Off Requests Will Be Granted

Holidays don’t mean much to me. After two decades in retail, I’ve mostly come to associate the season with vacation blackout and entitled shoppers. I’m a middle management Grinch. Your magical day means the start of my hell period. It’s how I imagine service industry folks feel about brunch. Scrumptious for you; a war zone for them. For the past quarter century, I’ve largely resented the end of the year.   

I used to have to be dragged through the Nevada sagebrush to come to holiday events. I was too punk. Too broody. But I’d show up. I had to. My family is small. It’s pretty much my pops and I. My absence would be noted. 

He’d always cook Thanksgiving dinner. The standard fare: unhappy-marriage-dry-pussy turkey, frozen peas microwaved and drained of nutrients and color into the sink, and Pillsbury crescent rolls. Oh, and Martinelli’s Apple Cider. The champagne of fruit juices. That part fucked.  

Through no fault of his own, the food kinda sucked. Who am I to judge? I didn’t do shit. I didn’t help. One of my many Achillies character flaws is that I can’t cook.  I’m a walking bachelor cliche. One nondescript Thanksgiving Day, my Dad looks up from his desert-kissed turkey, and says, “Fuck this. Fucking thing never turns out. It’s always dry. Why the hell do we do this?” 

It is at this moment he has an epiphany that changes the course of our culinary future. “We could just be having crab legs and steak. Next year, that’s what we do. Crab legs and steak.” And my father is a man of his word. Next year, that’s exactly what we had. My father trashed tradition. Turkey be damned. Stuffing, get fucked. In the Delehanty household, it was dick-thick crab legs and steak for Thanksgiving. We never looked back. Throw on a Rocky movie and the new guard of holiday traditions was born. 

I did not appreciate these magnificent feasts as an adolescent. I was still kicking rocks about how phony the holidays were. I was up in my Holden Caulfield, Ennegram-4-in-stress feelings about it. It is only now, as I sit alone in my sub 300 sq-ft cat-less apartment that I’m aware of how good I had it. We ate steak. We crushed the limbs of sea bugs. We were men. We ate until it hurt. 

My father taught me to never trust authority, that adults didn’t know shit. They were fat, old kids. He eschewed tradition. The holy voice from above that demanded turkey and cranberry sludge,  and fucking yams. He said, “No fate but what we make.” Well, I mean, Sarah Connor said that, but we watched T2 so many times it practically could have been him. I know my Dad best doing his thoroughly competent Rocky impression. And I can say with confidence, we did not hear no bell.  

He’s far from me now, and there’s no crab. There’s no steak. There’s just the realization I had it better than I had the capacity to understand. It wasn’t perfect, but it was ours. It was a Delehanty holiday and it’s not clear there will ever be another one.

I’m still a grinch. But, I’m a grinch that the times I used to be grinchy about aren’t around anymore. Ain’t that a fucking stubbed toe. Out here yearning for the times I was a little bitch about while they were happening? This is the tragedy of youth. 

Hug your Dad.