Colonel Brandon, Thanksgiving and Jello Salad

     Before I begin my rant, I must get one very important thing out of the way: Who on God's green earth ever decided upon the spelling of the word "colonel"?  This is one of my life long pet peeves and offers further proof that Ben Franklin's idea for a purely phonetic alphabet should have caught on!  How is it that "kernel" and "colonel" are pronounced the same way?  But I digress from what is certain to be a much longer digression from the realm of sane and sound thinking.  The title of this week's post references a Jane Austen character, an American holiday and a holiday food staple.  What, one may wonder, do each of these three very different things have to do with one another?: no one cares about them.  Colonel Brandon is a character from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.  He is referenced in the novel by the dashing and much sought after Willoughby as, "the kind of person whom everyone speaks well of, but whom no one remembers to talk to."  He is dependable, duty bound, kind, and full of stories that will never be told because everyone assumes he is a middle-aged stiff.  And, let's face it, in the movie adaptation, Willoughby does have much better hair.  After the impish Willoughby breaks Marianne's heart to pursue some rich trollop, Marianne settles, after some persuasion, upon marrying Colonel Brandon, for purely sensible reasons of course.  As for Thanksgiving; you may argue that everyone loves turkey day, complete with it's football games, parades, pies and food induced comas.  I ask you this: If everyone loves Thanksgiving so much, why is it completely overshadowed by the much more dashing Christmas every single year?  I might add that this overshadowing seems to occur progressively earlier each year.  I think I heard Christmas music on one station the day after Halloween.  Thanksgiving is to Christmas as Colonel Brandon is to Willoughby.  Now for the jello salad, which just so happens to be a staple in many homes on the Colonel Brandon of holidays.  For the past three Thanksgivings spent with my family, I have been in charge of making the jello salad.  It is a Bavarian cream jello salad that has been made by our family for years.  I personally enjoy it very much.  Every year it sits in little bowls near the upper left side of plates.  After pounds of turkey and potatoes and yams and stuffing, rolls and olives and pickles and green bean casserole are consumed, the jello salad still sits forlorn in it's little bowls.  It is usually eaten eventually, purely out of obligation.  But it is not turkey, or stuffing or mashed potatoes and gravy.  It is certainly not pie.  Jello salad is the Colonel Brandon of Thanksgiving food.

     So what?  What is the point?  Call me Colonel Brandon.  I suppose you could call me "Thanksgiving" or "Jello Salad", but that would just be weird.  Have you ever been in a room full of people and said something incredibly witty or funny, but only the person sitting right next to you has heard?  Ten minutes later, the person who was sitting next to you repeats your witty statement word for word (or sometimes not even as well as you originally said it) and everyone in the room laughs and carries on as if it were the cleverest thing anyone had ever said.  This is the story of every large group conversation of my entire life.  Apparently I have a quiet voice, or so I've been told.  I have always felt invisible in large groups. This complex has grown worse since having children.  I now feel invisible to just about everyone some days.  If you want to feel like no one is listening to a word you say, spend a day with three children under the age of ten.  I think I told my children it was time for dinner no less than twelve times last night before they finally showed up at the table.  To further my complex even more, I have the most thankless and invisible calling ever in my church.  I play piano for the children's organization (in our church called "Primary").  I sit behind a piano for two hours in a room that smells of petrified urine and play peppy little songs while half of the children sing and the other half climb up curtains or pick their noses.  The only person who remotely acknowledges I am there is the chorister, who occasionally remembers to nod her head in my general direction when it is time for a song to begin.  In my own family growing up, I was always the last one finished eating at meal times.  I would sit alone for 15-20 minutes finishing my plate of food.  Usually by the time I got done, the rest of my family had cleared their plates, washed their dishes, and were half way through their favorite prime time tv show.  I guess I have a bit of a Colonel Brandon complex.  Now let's take a step back here for a moment.  This is all my pride talking.  It is when I am feeling most prideful that my complex is the strongest, because it is only then that I really care if anyone notices me or what anyone else thinks of me.  It is in these prideful moments that I wish, for just once in my life, to know how it feels to be a Mr. Bingley, or an Elizabeth Bennett, to be the life of the party, or at the very least someone who people remember to talk to.  There are days when I am just plum tired of being the jello salad of every gathering.  I want to be a candied yam or a pumpkin pie.  These are the days I feel like dying my hair hot pink and screaming, "How do you like me now, punks?!"  But of course I never do.  I sit dutifully in the corner or alone at the table and observe everyone around me as they laugh at one another's jokes and show genuine interest in what the other has to say.  Then I usually go home and pour out all my feelings and thoughts to a keyboard or a pen and paper, who have no choice but to let me say exactly what it is I have to say.  But enough of pride and self pity.
     I believe that the antidote to pride is gratitude.  Sad, isn't it, that one of our most underrated, and under appreciated holidays is actually one of the most important?  It is one day out of 365 on which we gather with the people we love most and remember just how very much we have to be thankful for.  I may be a Colonel Brandon, but I am a Colonel Brandon with a lot to be thankful for.  When I can let go of pride, and look outside myself, my awareness of the miraculous blessings in my life, as well as my gratitude for those blessings grow exponentially.  I can see exactly how much I have been given and how much I take for granted every day of my life.  My life is full of seemingly small conveniences that to others around the world would seem blessed miracles: clean water from a faucet which I merely have to turn on, shelter, warmth, three solid and healthy meals each day, vaccinations and modern medicine for my children, and for myself (without which, neither myself nor Hyrum would have lived through his birth), a soft bed and a pillow to rest my head on at the end of the day,  a few close friends who listen to every word I say and love me for exactly who I am, a family who loves me unconditionally.  The list could go on and on.  When I take a step back to look outside of myself, of my own pride and insecurities, I am reminded of the miracle of my very existence.  Alan B. Shepard, the first American to travel in space, who saw the earth from a vantage point which most of us never will, said this of our beloved planet, "It [Earth] is in fact, very finite, very fragile...so incredibly fragile."  And yet this incredibly fragile orb continues, day after day, season after season, to spin around its axis, one tiny dot in the vast expanse of the universe.  It spins and spins, largely unnoticed, as we go about our daily business of making jello salads, preparing for holidays that will be forgotten as soon as the last bite of turkey is had, sitting alone in corners and observing what in truth is a most miraculous and gratitude inspiring phenomenon that we call daily life.