Well, if you don’t want to talk turkey, you can just enjoy eating a vegan one on Thanksgiving Day. Or there’s an alternative.  You can talk gobbledygook!

Gobbledygook is the opposite of talking turkey, good straight forward talk, said U.S. Representative Maury Maverick who was born in 1895.

He listened to the gobbling of turkeys and said it sounded just like the pronouncements of Washington. Sadly, there will be a lot fewer innocent turkey gobbling this Thanksgiving, but we can expect the gobbledygook to continue in Washington.

So, let’s talk turkey about this holiday.

We will hear much about Thanksgiving as being a family day, and yet as an analyst and psychotherapist, I know the stories of many single, separated, and divorced people who will feel the pain and loss of not having a family gathering on this day.

There will be a lot of people who will be kindly invited to join another family. Yet, regardless of their best smile, they will feel they just don’t belong. The occasion will accentuate their loneliness, and feelings of isolation. A hard day of pretending about what just isn’t there.

There will be a lot of people who can’t afford to do anything special on this special day because they don’t have the money, the job, the energy, or much hope for things improving.

Many sermons will remind us to be grateful and rightly so, and yet others will feel guilty that they feel angry and resentful about being denied some of the basic pleasures of life.

While some of us gobble with the turkeys, “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go,” others will eat too much, drink too much, and drive too fast putting themselves and others at risk on our nation’s high ways suddenly brought low into grief and anguish.

Some families will sit down at tables where there are incredible tensions between husbands and wives often invisibly carried by their children. They will try to make a day of it that cannot be made and will feel hurt and disappointed that something has been lost they so yearn to have with each other.

It’s just a hard day for many people in our society.

We often persecute ourselves with the ideal thanksgiving day, and although we don’t cook the national turkey, we will focus on the ideal family, political positions, children’s behaviors, bringing harsh judgments against ourselves and others – even those closest to us.

Some on this day will think of those early settlers and the results of subsequent colonization. They faced seemingly insurmountable odds in their environments even as we do in our polarized world today.

Perhaps it is well to remember that there are still places we can go to sit down and have an honest conversation, therapy being one of them. There we can at least begin to take the edge off our loneliness and the pain of isolation.