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A Homesickness Remedy for the Holiday Week
Most Thanksgivings, from the moment you shrug off your coat in a relative’s hallway to start the flurry of hugs, you already know how the next few hours are going to play out.
Holiday time is a story we tell ourselves, over and over, beat by familiar beat: The smell of Grandma’s famous mac and cheese in the oven, the cousin game of touch football, the point in the night when Aunt Nancy inevitably gets a little wine-tipsy and tries to start a sing-along. You’ve done this all before. You’ll do it again.
This, obviously, is not most Thanksgivings. And as many of us prepare to spend the holiday apart from our loved ones, Veronica Walsingham shares her go-to homesickness remedy, one that still involves the comfort of well-known, well-loved stories: the TV binge.
“When you’re feeling stressed or sad about your current circumstances, reexperiencing familiar stories can bring a soothing sense of control,” Walsingham writes. And for those of us missing out on the warm nostalgia that comes with a trip back home, she explains, settling in to rewatch a season or two of an old favorite can, in its own way, conjure a bit of that feeling:
Sitting through a Friends marathon transports me to those teenage Thursday nights watching alongside my mother. Most of the jokes flew over my head at that point, but I still laughed because my mother did, and that meant something was funny. Gilmore Girls, which I first watched by myself, fills me with happiness, and the sweet sense of independence that came with finally having a show that was all mine. Sex and the City takes me to my final years of high school, when I watched extremely edited reruns on TBS and felt like an adult…While it may not fully fill the hole created by being so far from immediate family and lifelong friends, surrounding myself with my favorite fictional characters is my second best option.
Look, no television show can change the fact that this is a particularly strange and hard week in a strange and hard stretch. But absent the usual traditions that anchor us this time of year, there’s solace to be found in spending time with something you know more or less by heart.
