Back in the 2010s, years before we’d moved back to Virginia, our family’s only exposure to Staunton came on Thanksgiving. We were all much more spread out in those days, with my wife, Caitlin, and I living out-of-state, my in-laws residing in Roanoke, and the rest of our family in Richmond. Yet every November we’d converge on the Queen City to partake in the brunch buffet at Hotel 24 South (known back then as the Stonewall Jackson Hotel, but since renamed for obvious reasons). The occasion gave us an excuse to wear fancy clothes, eat good food and indulge in a few drinks, all while enjoying the company of loved ones. It was a tradition I think we all hoped would stand the test of time, yet it still ended up drifting into the past. I’ll get into the reasons why this has happened later, but before we do that, let me wax philosophical about Thanksgiving.
Depending on your preference for celebration, Thanksgiving can feel like a marooned holiday. Adrift between the dual behemoths of Halloween and Christmas, Thanksgiving receives much less fanfare, and is sometimes completely overlooked by people so excited about the Yuletide season that they refuse to stop and smell the turkey. I can’t think of a single Thanksgiving song (a truth lampooned by an SNL skit that Caitlin I still quote to this day), and while there’s the occasional blow-up turkey in someone’s front yard, the level of decor is noticeably thin compared to the two-story-high ghouls of October and the electricity-bill-destroying lights of December. There are no haunted houses or scenic train rides. Just cranberry sauce and football. There’s also the possibility of being seated near a family member who loves to start contentious political discussions, a phenomenon that seems to occur more frequently on Thanksgiving than on Christmas, despite both holidays featuring close contact with loved ones who may hold conflicting viewpoints. A theory for this: Thanksgiving lacks the buffer of communal joy, the inherent feel-goodness of Christmas, when people are riding a dopamine high from exchanging gifts. Being nice to each other on Christmas is a moral imperative, lest we be labeled a Scrooge. This isn’t the case on Thanksgiving, a holiday where we can shovel stuffing into our mouths and act grumpy if we damn well please.
Thanksgiving’s timing within the seasons is also to its detriment. Halloween occurs in peak autumn, when the idea of fall is still fresh, the trees are beautiful, and the air is refreshingly crisp. Christmas, meanwhile, occurs at the onset of winter, a season that, for all its faults, is comfortable with its identity, and has the potential to deliver the most fabled of holiday weather events: a white Christmas. Where does that leave Thanksgiving? In the limbo period of late fall, a time of year that, let’s admit, no one likes all that much, considering the trees have mostly become skeletal, it gets dark at 4:15, and the weather is usually (but not always) a bit too warm to deliver a snowstorm. With all of these aspects falling against Thanksgiving’s favor, some people leap into the Christmas season the moment the last “trick or treat” is uttered.
I sympathize with this impulse. But now that I’ve listed all the reasons why Thanksgiving may be considered an inferior holiday, let me argue why it’s not. First of all, the comparative lack of hype and consumerism (Black Friday notwithstanding) makes it far less daunting than Christmas, a holiday that has anxiety baked into its crust, emotional and financial, self-imposed and culturally-imposed…a certain obligation to buy the right gifts, to be in a perfectly jolly mood (or else, Scrooge!), and to react with enthusiasm to every present, even if what you’re really thinking is I don’t need another portable smoothie maker! Thanksgiving, meanwhile, allows us to merely exist in each other’s company. Those Thanksgiving trips to Staunton are some of my fondest holiday memories. The atmosphere was festive, and everyone was, for the most part, in good spirits, the food prepared by someone else, and all of us comfortably seated in a brightly lit space in a historic hotel instead of stuffed in a hot house stressing about whether the turkey would emerge from the oven overcooked. My father-in-law would give a loose-yet-heartfelt toast, emboldened by a couple of mixed drinks, then hand out thick history books with titles like The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm to every adult in the room. Whether the books were ever read was beside the point. It was Thanksgiving tradition, which made it meaningful in itself.
After eating, we’d pose for a picture in front of the giant Christmas tree in the lobby. Then, with full stomachs, we’d flaneur around downtown Staunton, which felt quite unlike any other American city I’d visited up until that point, with the well-preserved historic buildings and ornate churches, the streets silent and empty on account of the holiday. It was never a long walk, just substantial enough to burn off some extra holiday calories, but Staunton’s charm still managed to imprint itself on my memory. One year we did, in fact, have snow on Thanksgiving, and while our boots were crunching on the white sidewalks, Caitlin reached into the grass and packed a tight snowball. She hurled it toward her cousin, Matthew, but missed, drilling her sweet Aunt Sara in the back of the head. There was a moment of panic, but all was forgiven. Aunt Sara laughed it off, and the good spirit of Thanksgiving remained intact.
Much has changed in the six years since we last celebrated Thanksgiving in Staunton. Why were we forced to abandon a tradition that was cherished by pretty much every member of the family? The answer, as it so often seems to be, is life. Life barged in and trashed our well-laid plans. My mother-in-law was diagnosed with multiple systems atrophy in 2019, and her physical demise was so swift that my father-in-law had to become her full-time caretaker. The hour-and-a-half drive from Richmond to Staunton during the last few years of her life would’ve been unjustifiably difficult for both of them. She died this April, on a bright spring day that saw the second total eclipse in seven years. It felt roundly unfair that someone with so much living left to do (she was in her late 60s) was forced to leave this world on such a gorgeous day.
Apologies if the following passage comes off as grim or self-pitying, but our family has been marred by what feels like an inordinate amount of death this year. First there was my mother-in-law, an event so traumatic we may never fully process it, followed by a procession of deaths in her wake that includes, in no particular order: Aunt’s Sara’s cat Ceasar (an ornery overweight feline, but still part of the family); her bird, Chico (who served as her security system for almost three decades); Caitlin’s cousin’s husband, who died from a midnight heart-attack; our Florida friends’ stepfather, who, like my mother-in-law, suffered through a long and progressively debilitating illness; our Texas friend’s beloved Rottweiler, Big Head, who was put down after 10-plus years of slobbery cuddles; and lastly, Caitlin’s grandfather, a World War II veteran and former Merchant Marines captain who passed peacefully in his sleep at the age of 100. George was once the epicenter of another one of our yearly traditions: in the late 2010s, we’d travel to his home in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to watch the Super Bowl and partake in a gluttonous seafood feast. Those were good times, sweet times, but they’re gone now, too, the house he lived in sold, our reason for returning to Kentucky, gone. Death, as you may have heard, is inescapable, and as we grow older it occurs with more regularity. I don’t pretend our struggles with mortality this year have been more significant than anyone else’s, but even so, it has felt exceptionally brutal.
Yet we carry on. Old traditions fade and new ones take their place. This Thanksgiving we’ll gather at Aunt Sara’s restaurant in Richmond, the snowball hurled into the back of her head mostly forgotten. We’ll eat good food and enjoy each other’s company and embrace the warm chaos while trying to avoid the pesky political conversations that often arise after a couple of adult beverages. We’ll limp through this first holiday season without the presence of two people who meant so much to us. We’ll be navigators without maps. It’ll be emotional and a touch overwhelming, but we’ll tumble blindly forward in the hope of finding a path that has been laid out for us all along. We’ll be surrounded by people we love, and it’ll all seem so solid and permanent, though we know from experience that this permanence is merely a persistent mirage, a compelling coping mechanism. The children in our orbit will remind us of life’s transience, too, as they flitter around our ankles and climb on our bodies and smear mash potatoes on our freshly-laundered sweaters. Their presence will give us hope that they’ll one day carry on these traditions, or create new ones of their own. The substance of any one tradition isn’t all that important. It’s the existence of traditions in the first place that matters most, and the ability to form new ones from the rubble of old ones, as we must.
It brings to mind a quote by George Saunders, one of the most celebrated writers of the 21st century. Full transparency: I had to Google this quote, because I’m not an academic type who can recite passages of literature verbatim. Plus, I haven’t actually read the book that the quote comes from, Lincoln in the Bardo, which was named one of the best books of the millennium by The New York Times, but I have read several of Saunders’ other works and can confirm he’s abundantly quote-worthy. To wit:
Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now we must lose them.
There was no way for Caitlin and I to predict we’d one day live in Staunton. But when we decided to move back to Virginia last year, the memory of those pleasant Thanksgiving day walks played a key role in our decision to settle there instead of Harrisonburg or Waynesboro. Staunton seemed like a fine place to raise a family, and it’s delivered on that promise so far. Perhaps someday we’ll rekindle the tradition of congregating at Hotel 24, but not this year. There are too many tough memories tied up in that building, emotionally-charged remembrances of people recently lost, faces that burn with unbearable heat in our minds. The deaths we’ve suffered this year are still too raw. Perhaps when we feel sufficiently healed, if such a day ever comes, we’ll make our triumphant return. But it’s just as likely that we’ll never go back. Either way it’ll be OK, so long as we embrace some kind of tradition to carry us forward, no matter what form it takes.
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag.
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