Thanks...No, really, I mean it...

Ah, Thanksgiving.

It's either a joyous and timeless tradition of gathering, remembering, commemorating and togetherness, or a psychotic mess of nasty food, family squabbles and enough things-gone-wrong to give Murphy his own Law Book. For most people - usually and thankfully - the tradition is somewhere in the middle.

Whether your tradition is to celebrate by traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to eat your mom's stuffing and hear Uncle Jack's joke about the lady who walks into the hardware store with a live gerbil and a rubber spatula for the umpteenth time, or to spend a quiet evening out in a restaurant by yourself or with your significant other, Thanksgiving is something more than the traditional start of the holiday season. If New Year's and the Fourth of July are the party holidays, and Christmas is the now-overly-commercialized-to-the-point-we-don't-even-want-to-celebrate-it holiday, Thanksgiving is the spirit and ideal that drives us through the rest of the year while giving us a chance to look back fondly.

Usually. Some people are just too Type-A. Those people can't be helped, so I'm just talkin' about the rest of us. Y'know, the normal folk...

By this time, the holiday season has completely enveloped us, and traditions are as in full swing as pumpkin patches overflowing with ripe orange gourds and wild turkeys with death clocks faintly ticking down to doomsday above their spindly heads. So begins repeat visits to grocery stores for constantly-forgotten items that have since vanished from the shelves because they were also forgotten by 9,000 other people before you. We spend our days, and sometimes weeks, creating culinary game plans with the clockwork precision of military wargames. Checklists featuring everything from the savory to the sweet preoccupy our thoughts. Multiplying recipes, cooking times, quantities and transportation logistics take center stage in our thoughts. We become Rain Man in our ability to figure out how to cook a turkey while also heating up dinner rolls and making sure Aunt Betty's green bean casserole doesn't congeal like tiny twigs stuck in mud, all in the same tiny oven. Homes are cleaned just a little bit more than usual; pillows fluffed, furniture and knicks knacks moved for a more thorough vacuuming or dusting. Cobwebs we've ignored all year long suddenly vanish in a blurred tornado of arm movements and strained backs.

We know it's coming every year, yet every year it sneaks up on us. While some traditions need to die quick and violent deaths (we all have them or know of them, so I don't need to elaborate), some - like panicking a week before Thanksgiving because the only poultry left in the freezer section is a cornish game hen the size of a baseball that somehow has to magically feed 18 people - are just necessary for the true mean of "thanks giving" to come out.

Since I was a teenager, my mom has made Thanksgiving her holiday. Whether it was when I contemplated moving to Seattle for a job, or when my ex-wife and I talked about moving away for her career, my mom always made it clear that I had to be home for Thanksgiving. It was tradition. I was given a free pass to miss her birthday, Mother's Day and Christmas (not "miss" as in forget, "miss" as in I didn't have to come home. A phone call at the very least was still mandatory.) so long as my pasty white butt was seated at the dinner table on that particular Thursday.

Part of it's because she - like most moms - is big on the whole "family gathering" thing, but it's also because she hates the thought of anyone spending a holiday alone. If you have nowhere to go on Thanksgiving, my mom makes sure there's a spot for you at our table. It's been that way for years.

It's traditon.

It may have been the rule long before this, but I remember it really becoming a tried and true, dyed in the wool, set in stone Tradition-with-a-capital-T when my dad was stationed in Augsburg, Germany, back in the late 1980s. Dad was the NCOIC (non-commissioned officer in charge..."middle management" to the rest of us) of the emergency room at the army hospital, and as such had a lot of people working under him. When my parents found out that many of those people had no place to go for Thanksgiving, they opened our home to the lot of them. People brought their favorite dishes, and room was made on any open space available. No one was turned away, and no gesture of food was left untouched.

It was always an all-day event because some people worked in the morning (meaning they got out late and came over after) and some worked in the afternoon (meaning they came over before their shift). At one point, our three-bedroom apartment had around 50 men, women and children laughing, playing, eating and drinking all throughout the space. Kids congregated in my room or my brother's room, playing with Legos or whatever action figures we dug out of the closet (even the girls, who generally preferred the Legos to the G.I. Joes) while adults crowded the living room, kitchen and dining room. Everyone was happy, everyone had a good time.

Hard to not want to keep that kind of tradition alive, isn't it?

In the 25 years since, the number of people have dwindled, but it's still pretty large. Last year, we had in-laws for both Harper brothers, including the future in-laws of my in-laws so they didn't have to split up their family. This year we have some new faces coming...again, because they had nowhere else to go and my mom found out about it. We're looking at close to 30 people this year, but Thanksgiving's not until tomorrow, so who knows who else might show up. That's the fun of it, right?

The tragedy though, for me, is knowing how much this year is going to hurt. And it's going to hurt a lot.

Thanksgiving is a time to sit back and...well, give thanks for the people, things and events that have led us to this point in our lives. As I type this, though, I find myself not really in a thankful mood. If I sit back and look over the last year, I'm faced with a lot of heartache and pain: The loss of a child in the early stages of my now ex-wife's pregnancy, finding out my sister-in-law got pregnant mere months later, the dissolution of a three-year marriage, the subsequent moving back in to my parents home while I spent more than two months looking for a job, the birth of my niece, and watching my limited finances disappear just trying to keep up with bills.

Now, a lot of you will read this and tell me to get over myself, to think positive. I was told earlier today that I needed to focus on spending Thanksgiving with my family. But you know what? That's easier said than done. For starters, almost everyone who's going to be here tomorrow is in a working, committed marriage, while my divorce paperwork showed up in the mail yesterday. Great damn timing, that is. Also, I get to spend an entire day watching people gush and fawn over my niece, Ava. So while everyone's going on and on about the "first grandbaby" and talking about how beautiful and precious she is, I get to sit there and pretend none of that hurts. That Ava would actually be the second grandbaby, and that my child will never get to be gushed or fawned over, or told how beautiful and precious he/she is. And the best part? The absolutely heart-wrenching, soul-crushing best part? I get to go through all of this on my own. Completely alone. Why? Because the one person in my life who I thought would be by my side for better or worse, in sickness and in health, til death do us part, decided to walk out on our life together, and the final nail in that coffin just came in the mail.

So yeah, I'm a whole lotta thankful this year. I'm one big cornucopia of thankful. I'm a fucking buffet of things to be thankful for.

Am I thankful for my family and friends? Of course. Am I thankful that my niece - whom I adore with all my heart - is happy and healthy? You bet I am. Am I thankful I finally have a job and am able to pay my bills? Damn straight. But Thanksgiving is a time to spend enjoying the company of those most important to you, a time to look on those friends and family and realize how great it is to have people like that in your life. Not this year, though, and not for me. My life has been turned upside down and ripped into mangled shreds. Tomorrow, I won't see any good in that. The people around me won't help me take my mind off my problems, they will be unintentionally compounding them with every look and every laugh. Were I still married, if I had someone by my side I could lean on and give support back to, then tomorrow would be tolerable. As it is, I'll be spending Thanksgiving surrounded by the people I love the most, and completely unable to enjoy it.

Some traditions need to die quick and violent deaths. This is one of them.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Whatever your tradition is, however you choose to spend the holiday, I hope and pray it is filled with all the love and happiness you deserve. I am truly thankful for all of you, and I apologize for not being able to express it better. We all deserve better than this; I'm just sorry I can't hold up my end of it.