Early leftovers: The family breakdown

Thanksgiving illustrates this concept of mine. A repost from Thanksgiving Eve 2023.

Photo by Megan Watson on Unsplash

While it was enjoyable for me to recall how my Thanksgiving used to be, I also wanted to use the post to preface a point.

Most of us still spend the holiday with family, but there seems to be a trend of fewer and fewer of us cooking. While just 7% of respondents to a Gallup Poll from the year 2000 planned on dining out - most of them over 65, meaning they were likely retirees with few close-by family members who didn’t feel up to traveling and couldn’t be hosts - it seems there are a lot more opportunities for dining out this year.

I get it: those who like to cook are getting older and I’m not sure the younger folks have the culinary chops to keep up. Sometimes cooking is a generational thing and young (mostly) women haven’t spent as much time in the old-school kitchen baking and basting the turkey, preparing the stuffing, and so forth. (I think guys like to fry their turkeys.)

Regardless of my admittedly sexist viewpoint - because I think most guys are like me, the culinarily challenged ones who burn water - the one thing that can be missed in this generational change is that more and more people are opting to eat out for Thanksgiving. Maybe it’s older folks, but it could also be younger couples who are far away from family or those whose living situations preclude hosting a large gathering.

But that also creates a vicious circle: the more people who eat out on Thanksgiving, the fewer opportunities there are for family get-togethers because someone has to work to serve them. We had a backlash after a few years of Black Friday creeping backward into Thanksgiving, but I think this trend of eating out for Thanksgiving is going to go the other way for awhile and do its little bit to break up families some more.

At one point in our pre-modern culture, we could have elaborate meals for Thanksgiving because the women stayed home and did the cooking - a feat made possible because the male breadwinner made enough money to support a family by himself. Most people chalked that up to the rise of unions in the middle part of the 20th century, but that leaves out the 60-plus percent of the workforce that wasn’t unionized, yet still made an ample salary for accomplishing this.

During World War 2, having women join the workforce was a necessity because the able-bodied men were off fighting the OG Axis of Evil. But most of those women returned to the homefront after the fighting was over, and (it turned out) became fertile incubators of a baby boom that lasted nearly two decades. Meanwhile, the men built up this consumer-crazy nation, cranking out cars, houses, and even a few labor-saving kitchen appliances that were priced for the mass market.

Now I’m sure the naysayers will scream about all the repression that was going on and how women were being exploited. Yet, while divorce became easier and more prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s, there were still millions of couples who married in the postwar era whose marriages indeed lasted until death do they part. Married in 1960, my mom and dad were one of those couples, although my mom rejoined the workforce after we were old enough to take care of ourselves.

I think she did it to help be a provider, but now two-earner couples are the norm because they have to be. One wage earner doesn’t seem to be enough these days, even as couples have fewer children.

But the conundrum is a two-sided question: did we go to two-earner couples because things got more expensive, or did it become a necessity to maintain a lifestyle people got accustomed to? Or was it the media- and culturally-driven siren song telling women, “you can have it all?” And when things went south, did the ease of divorce cause people to pull the trigger on that option too soon? We won’t even get into the age of birth control and 40% of children now born out of wedlock.

To make a long story short, we have placed ourselves in a position where Thanksgiving isn’t all about family anymore - in a lot of cases, it’s become a game of which part of the semi-related clan would be missed the least if they weren’t invited to Thanksgiving dinner. Do you have to have the ex-girlfriend there because you want to have the child you had with her come for dinner?

But there is encouragement out there. Yesterday I saw a young married couple who was in our small group for a time before his job moved him along and out of the area had their second boy since leaving us - an extra blessing for Thanksgiving. Perhaps their little boy, born with a loving and committed mom and dad, is a harbinger of things to come, a sign of another long-overdue Great Awakening.

Pray for the young people to lose their love for worldly things and come back to faith and family. We would all be better off.