I suppose it’s hard for me to think of this upcoming weekend as a "holiday" because I only teach Mondays and Wednesdays, and MCCC has class today. In a lot of ways this may be a busier weekend than usual for me because tomorrow I get to cook my very first vegetarian turkey for myself (I’d looked for them locally in past years but they always sold out before I could get one), and then Friday I’m actually going to do some Black Friday shopping against my better judgment. Mom is going up to Michigan to visit with relatives, but of course they don’t like me showing up to those things, and I don’t particularly feel like going anyway. As usual, Thanksgiving will also involve lots of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and waffle consumption, but I’ll be toning it down this year because I gained a lot of weight during my two illnesses, and I just started back on my diet this past Sunday and I don’t want to screw things up so soon.

While I was sick, I made a point of going to Kroger on the first of this month so I could grab some of the leftover Halloween candy on deep discount. Apparently I wasn’t alone in this desire, because by the time I got to Kroger that afternoon, there was no Halloween candy left to buy; they were even out of candy corn, for crying out loud. (I love how candy corn is becoming to this generation what Christmas fruitcakes were to generations past, with all the tales of how no one ever really eats it and it just keeps getting passed down from generation to generation.) What bothered me more than the lack of cheap candy, though, was the fact that Kroger had already put up two whole aisles of Christmas displays. I understand that the retail Christmas season keeps coming earlier and earlier, but it feels like Kroger decided to skip Thanksgiving entirely and go straight to Christmas. I would imagine that Kroger normally makes a lot of money with Thanksgiving dinners and their accoutrements every year, so this hardly seems like a wise strategy to me. Then again, it’s not like I have intimate knowledge of their sales figures.

Needless to say, this being the first holiday season without Dad is starting to get to me. It’s been hard to come up with things to write about for my annual "year in review" .journal entry here because I don’t really know how to describe something like this. Certainly there are a lot of bad emotions I’m feeling right now, and I can write about those, but I think that more than anything I’m just feeling a real absence right now. I don’t mean just the physical absence of Dad; there’s also an emotional absence to the season that I can’t put into better words than that. The only thing I can think to compare it to is when your favourite player leaves, or retires from, your favourite sports team, and you try to watch the team’s games after that but it just doesn’t feel the same. I don’t really feel like that’s an apt analogy, though, because sports are just sports, and family is something infinitely more important. I don’t know if the absence is necessarily painful, but it certainly isn’t a good feeling, and I can tell that from now through the end of the calendar year it’s only going to get worse.