I think my mother always wanted to be June Cleaver. She wanted Ward to take care of the Beav while she flounced around in a shirtwaist, baked bread and vacuumed the house in heels. But instead, she found herself in her early 30s, widowed, with two kids to support. Flouncing was out, needless to say, and breadwinning soon replaced bread baking.

My mother never really liked to cook anyway, so that was the first chore to go when she went to work. My sister and I grew up on Instant Breakfast, deli meat, and Swanson TV dinners. We never ate anything that had to be peeled or chopped.

But every year as Thanksgiving approached, we’d find her sitting at the table cutting complicated recipes out of Good Housekeeping magazine. I think she saw Thanksgiving dinner as her personal “Day of Atonement,” the day when she would do penance for what she saw as her “Sins of Culinary Neglect.” She’d always invite a ton of people to this event too: people from work, the lady next door and her no-good son-in-law, and my bachelor Uncle Jimmy.

A few days before the big day, my sister and I would help her unload stuff from the car the likes of which we never saw the rest of the year: bunches of carrots with the greens still on the ends, squashes of all colors and shapes, shallots (whatever they were) and other pieces of exotic produce. Out came cans of black olives, jars of marinated artichoke hearts and tall glass cylinders of tiny pearl onions. And a turkey the size of a Studebaker.

As the guests arrived, everyone would offer to help and everyone would be told the same thing: “The best way to help is to stay out of the kitchen.” I’d put out the olives, freshen the drinks and sit in front of the football game. As dinnertime drew closer, the sounds from the kitchen grew more ominous. What started as a barely audible curse, turned into louder and more colorful strings of them. Little bumps and thumps turned into polyphonic crashes. The sounds ended abruptly with the 25 lb turkey hurtling through the air, across the expanse of the dining room, before crashing into the wall, drippings splashing. My mother exploded out of the kitchen, grabbed her coat and car keys on the run and squealed out of the driveway.

My sister and I, the people from work, the lady from next door, the no-good son-in-law and Uncle Jimmy sat in stunned silence. My sister and I got up first, then everyone pitched in and we cleaned up the mess. They left, dinnerless, and my sister and I ate a turkey TV dinner and went to bed.

My mother has been dead for some years now, and I have had quite a few Thanksgivings where no one has had a nervous breakdown. But every year at this time of year, I think about how crazy and crazed the holidays make me, make a lot of people. I think about all the empty rituals I do just because I think I should, or because I always have, or because I have internalized some media image of what I should be doing this time of year, regardless of whether or not it meets any real personal need. I need to free myself of the tyranny of the turkey, the coercion of Christmas cards, the dictatorship of decorating. I need to break free and make new, meaningful personal rituals.

Sometimes I wish my mother had just ripped up the complicated recipes and thrown them against the wall. Now that would have made a great family tradition. One I would have gladly carried on.

Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga, 10 S. Main St., Mansfield, PA 16933. To contact her call 570-660-5873 or online www.yogamansfield.com or email at mainstreetyoga@gmail.com