Today in my FaceBook memories, there’s a picture of my oldest kid. It’s when she came to visit me for Thanksgiving after I had moved back to Northport from Bend and she stayed down in Oregon to finish her last year of high school. It was the first holiday season that one of my kids wasn’t there for the Whole Thing. It was the first sign of things to come.

It’s a natural progression. Everyone together for all of those years, and at some point, it begins to unravel. The traditions that you couldn’t imagine living without as a young child start to become logistically difficult, because of work, school, obligations to in-laws, long distance travel… all of the reasons. The logistical difficulties seem to swell to a climax as your own children begin to come of age and the tug of their retail jobs, sports events, and bad attitudes contribute to the the question - “why are we still trying to do this?.”

The first Christmas that I spent apart from my kids years ago was terrible. They were with their dad, and instead of staying nearby so I could selfishly cut into his holiday time like I usually did, I traveled several hours away to be with my parents. I cried that morning. I hugged my dog. It wasn’t Christmas, it was just a weird day with lots of people opening presents and a very uncomfortable sense of Alone. But I survived.

The years went on and the logistics increased in complexity and there was more off and on, piecing it together, “making it happen.”

And then you skip a year. You miss a thanksgiving with everybody. Instead of olives on your fingers and folding chairs squeezed into corners of the table for every cousin, you’re on a patio overlooking the Sea of Cortez, eating an “American Thanksgiving” buffet with a room full of strangers and a bottle of Mexican red wine.

And you don’t die. In fact, it’s ok. It’s weird. It’s different. But it’s a chance to remember all those amazing years and be grateful for them, even while you acknowledge that you could get used to this.

A couple of years ago, the idea of being alone on a holiday seemed like a fate worse than death. Now, as I’ve lived through some small holidays, some foreign holidays, some weird mixes of family and friends… being alone every now and then doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, there’s something liberating when you can fully release all expectation to perform EVERY traditional exercise to make a holiday perfect. There’s freedom in knowing that I can skip out on Stecker Apple Salad for one year and nobody will die. There is an overwhelming sense of peace on the other side of the driving guilt to create the ideal holiday experience for everyone around me. I’ll always love our big, traditional family holidays, but I am also starting to love doing my own thing every now and then.

If I had seen the trajectory of holidays played out after that Thanksgiving that Halle came home from Bend, I never would have guessed it would look like this. But I don’t mind. There are many, many things about my life that have surprised me since then. Letting go of long-held family traditions is one of the most unexpected turns for me. Traditions are the things that root us back into our values and remind us of who we are and what is important to us - what we have to be thankful for. But traditions evolve, just like people do, and there’s beauty in that.