Parson’s cousin passes his time by hovering over the soon-to-be-served turkey and inspecting the freshly cut meat. (Will Parson/Guardian)

Iam far from the only UCSD student that headed north for
Thanksgiving. With so many of us having come from Northern
California, a long vacation exodus is a common experience. And, no
matter how much we lament the traffic or cost of gas or plane tickets, a lot of
seniors like me have made this trek four or more times now, even though we go
home a few weeks later for winter break anyway.

What I looked forward to this year was three Thanksgivings.
Starting on the actual holiday, three nights found me having dinner first with
my immediate family and then with two sides of extended relatives. Like any
family gathering, I was not the only one with a camera in hand. But with a
succession of festivities I was in the unique position to compare the events
and gain an understanding of where family idiosyncrasies end and the national
holiday begins.

This Thanksgiving, I
decided beforehand to take pictures that could resonate with a larger audience,
and leave the group snapshots to someone else. Maybe then, I thought, I could
get to the heart of the holiday and elevate my family to the status of
archetypal characters of the holiday tradition, maybe like an updated scene
from a Norman Rockwell painting. So I began looking for symbols to incorporate.
The turkey was the most obvious place to start. Photographing everyone’s
relation to the turkey seemed like a safe bet. After all, even if I failed to
capture the essence of Thanksgiving, at least people would recognize which
holiday I was trying to describe.

What I discovered, beginning with the turkey and radiating
outward, was a holiday centered on rituals of waiting. It seemed to be the
natural manifestation of a tradition demanding the preparation of a bird that
takes all day to cook. With so much free time, it was interesting to focus on
how my different family members spent their idle hours: the men watched
football and drank beer on the patio; my grandmother, aunt and mother
collaborated on the final dinner preparations; my cousin played with her young
children and chatted with my sister. I found relief in the instant
gratification of the LCD screen on my brand new digital camera. Among my
family, though, subconscious lines of thought would cross, and conversations
around the household would wander from the subject of how much time the turkey
had left to chronicling how much time I had until graduation; from stressing
about an upcoming vacation to cooing about when my sister-in-law would have her
baby.

Toward the end of my three Thanksgiving dinners the
specifics of my family’s travails were blending together into a larger picture.
With millions of Americans celebrating Thanksgiving, I understood that in a
larger context it did not matter what my family was talking about, since certainly
a lot of people were similarly using Thanksgiving to relieve the stress. It was
then that I stopped seeing the individual worries of my family, and the
national holiday revealed itself.

I didn’t spend much time adhering to my duty as an objective
photographer. With everyone sitting around hungry, communicating their desires
and not actually doing much that could be described visually, it did not take
long to document the family spectrum anyway. I was fortunate enough to get my
serious efforts out of the way before I became drugged with tryptophan and the
nostalgic urge to photograph family pets took over my camera. For all of us,
the wait for turkey had given way, finally, to stretched stomachs and pumpkin
pie. And, for a while, everyone’s thoughts were not on what the future needed
to bring.