Three questions to settle while everyone is still calm, including the four days on either side of the holiday that families forget about every year.
Every year families wait until the second week of November to figure out the holidays, and every year that goes about as well as you’d expect.
Four weeks out, three questions are worth answering while everyone is still calm.
Where is she going to be, and for how long. A full day at your house with fourteen people and a television going is a lot for someone in their late eighties. Consider getting her there later and home earlier than feels right. Give her somewhere quiet to go when she needs it, an actual room with a door, and tell one person in the family that keeping an eye on that is their job.
Who is doing the driving. Not vaguely. By name. The pickup and the drop off are two different jobs and the drop off is the one that gets forgotten at nine at night when everybody’s had wine.
Who is covering the days around it. This is the one families miss. It isn’t Thanksgiving Day that’s hard. It’s the four days on either side, when everybody’s traveling, when the aide who normally comes is off, when her routine falls apart and the pharmacy is closed. Sort that now.
And if you’re traveling for the holiday, book the coverage this week. We fill up for Thanksgiving week earlier than any other week of the year except Christmas, and the calls that come in mid November are the ones we hate having to turn down.
There’s one more thing worth planning for. If your out of state siblings haven’t seen her since summer, they are going to see a change, and there’s going to be a conversation. Decide now whether you want that conversation to happen, because a house with the whole family in it is actually a decent place to have it.
Four weeks. Make the calls this week.
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