I know the big entertaining holidays are a long way off. It’s mid-summer and a hundred degrees, so forgive me for bringing up turkey and pumpkin pie.
But my mom, who hosts every holiday there is, started talking to me about it the other day, and something needs to be said.
Because that woman runs on gravy and steam for two days straight. She’s up at five prepping the bird.
She eats her own Thanksgiving dinner standing at the counter, in between carrying plates, and by the time the pie comes out, she’s the color of the tablecloth and can barely follow a conversation.
I love my mom’s Thanksgiving. I love every holiday she throws. But I’m starting to think she keeps doing all of it because it’s tradition.
And I can’t really call it a tradition anymore when the one person holding it up is barely hanging on by the end.
She never once thought not-hosting was an option
If there’s a woman like this in your family, you already know what I’m talking about.
She’s probably never sat down and considered that not doing it was allowed. She did it last year, and the ten years before that, so she’ll do it again. You’ve watched the question of whether she wants to fade out entirely.
It started for a reason, once. Maybe she has the big table, and nobody else does.
Maybe your grandmother’s stuffing lives in her head and nowhere else, no recipe card, just her hands knowing the amounts. Maybe her brother would sooner cancel the holiday than run it.
For my mom, it’s simpler and sadder than any of those. She hosts because if she didn’t, nobody would, and the holiday would just not happen.
There was one year, early on, when she waited to see if anyone else would offer. Nobody did. So she picked it up, the way you grab a dropped bag of groceries before the eggs break, and she’s been carrying it every year since.
A holiday can quietly turn into a chore
There’s something that happens when you do the same big day over and over. It slowly changes on you without changing on the outside.
Think about a dish you love to cook. The first few times, you follow a recipe. After that, you stop needing it, and you start making the thing your own, adjusting it, having fun with it. That’s a living thing.
A ritual goes the other direction. You repeat it so exactly, so carefully, year after year, that at some point the meaning drains out of the steps and only the steps are left.
You’re not doing it because it still feels good. You’re doing it because stopping feels wrong.
That’s the switch that happens to the host, and nobody sees it happen, because the table looks identical from the outside. There’s a turkey, the lace tablecloth that’s been passed down, and the circular political argument.
But you can catch it in the small things if you look and listen. The sigh before she pulls the roasting pan out. The way she says “it’s fine, I’ve got it” in a voice that means the opposite.
The count she does out loud about how early she has to be up.
Somewhere in there, for her, the “I want to” slid into “I have to,” and no one clocked the moment it flipped, least of all the people being served.
More Bolde Stories
The women who hold the traditions have always held them
It’s almost never split down the middle.
Roughly nine in ten of the people who keep a family’s traditions going are women.
The ones who remember whose birthday is coming, who sends the card, who plans the gathering, who makes sure the day happens at all instead of dissolving into a group text that goes nowhere.
It has been this way for generations, and it did not get handed out evenly.
Everyone else at that table, including you, gets the good version of the holiday. They arrive at a house that already smells like the food. They sit down to a spread that’s already out.
They walk into a warm, bright room that somebody got up at dawn to make warm and bright.
One person makes all of it, and that same one person is flattened by making it, while the rest of us walk in, enjoy every bit of it, and describe her being wiped out as simply how much she loves us.
We are, all of us, feasting on the back of one tired woman, and we’ve dressed it up as her happily doing what she was born to do.
Even if she loves it, she didn’t exactly choose it
I won’t sit here and say that no one likes hosting.
Plenty of women host the holidays because they love it, full stop. It’s the highlight of their year. My mom is one of them.
I’ve watched her face when the whole family is finally in one room, and she is lit up in a way she isn’t the other 364 days. I’m not going to pretend that joy isn’t real.
But loving something and having chosen it are two different things.
My mom was never asked. The role fell to her decades ago, before anyone thought to check if she wanted it, and she made it beautiful because that’s who she is.
That she found joy inside a job she didn’t pick doesn’t mean it was ever offered to her as a choice.
And “but she loves doing it” is the exact sentence that ends the conversation every time, right before anyone has to lift a finger. It’s true, and it’s also convenient, and both of those can be the case at once.
So try a test. Picture the woman in your family saying that this year she’d rather not host. Watch what happens next.
Does the family spring into action, divide up the dishes, and pick a new house? Or does the table go still, somebody says “but it won’t be the same,” and everyone waits, gently, for her to feel bad enough to take it back?
You already know the answer for your family. That answer is the whole point.
You’re the one who can let her sit down
I’m not making a case for canceling the holiday.
The tradition is fine. The tradition was never the problem. The problem is that it’s been running on one person’s body for twenty years while everyone treats her stamina as a renewable resource.
And you don’t have to wait for her to ask, because she won’t. She’ll never be the one to bring it up. Which means the person who can change it is you, the one who noticed.
Bring the sides already made instead of getting there, saying “I’ll help,” and then ask where the colander is. Take the dishes out of her hands before she reaches for them. Be the one who says, out loud, that she’s sitting down this year.
The day survives all of it. It was never as fragile as the guilt made it feel.
What I want for my own mom isn’t a canceled Thanksgiving.
It’s the same one, with her in the good chair at some point in the afternoon, a drink she didn’t have to get up for in her hand, watching the day she built happen around her instead of from behind the stove.
That’s still a tradition. It might just be the first year it gets to be one for her, too.
