While I love Thanksgiving, my family never made a big deal about it. We did not do those big family Thanksgivings where Aunt Erma flew in from Tacoma and Cousin Norman used his three-day pass from the Army just to come back and carve the turkey. While all of that is great, it just wasn’t us. For one, I do not have an Aunt Erma. Don’t get me wrong: Thanksgiving was a special time for us. It just didn’t come with a whole lot of pomp and circumstance.

So when I went to college a few states away, it didn’t make sense to fly back home for a four-day weekend. I spent that first Thanksgiving with some friends, and over the next several years I rarely went home for Thanksgiving. And when I got married, my wife and I were excited to start our own traditions with new friends.

Eventually, it dawned on me that spending Thanksgiving far from home and with new friends was oddly appropriate. After all, the Pilgrims did not hop on a plane back to England. Even if they had, it would have been weird since England does not celebrate Thanksgiving. No, the Pilgrims spent their holiday weekend way out of their comfort zone making new friends and celebrating God’s provision for them in a strange new life. My wife and I were like modern Pilgrims eating alongside hospitable locals. But just as I realized the historical significance of our tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving out on a limb, the limb broke.

We were spending this particular Thanksgiving with an odd assortment of people we sort of knew who had generously invited us into their home. Upon arriving, we whipped through introductions. My wife was pretty well acquainted with everyone. I, on the other hand, would spend several hours trying to remember names, which spouse went with which, and how I sort of knew them (church, my wife’s co-worker, someone’s cousin’s roommate’s mechanic’s sister, etc.).

We had barely gotten through the introductions when we began to see signs that this might not have been the best idea. I was discovering how little I had to talk about with the host, and my wife was discovering how much she wished she could say to the hostess. The host and hostess had spent some time at our church, and the hostess was explaining why they had left. Without going into detail, I will just say that the words “heretic hunters” and “unintellectual” were used. While I was not present, I would imagine that an astute listener would have been able to hear my wife’s taste-buds screaming as she bit her tongue. She has an amazing capacity for tongue-biting, far surpassing her less diplomatic husband. But I would get my chance before the day was over.

Thankfully, it was soon time to eat. And it is hard to put your foot in your mouth when your mouth is already full of mashed potatoes. We followed the meal up with a couple of games that continued to relieve the tense conversations and awkward silences.

It was at that point that the afternoon took a turn for the bizarre. Feeling the need for some entertainment, our host opened up his DVD collection and started throwing out ideas. I guess I expected something light and fun that would put me in the mood for pie. No such luck. Various documentaries made the shortlist with the final decision coming down to a documentary about the Afghan version of American Idol (complete with death-threats to female participants) and a documentary about people groups relatively untouched by “the modern world” who lived in remote jungles (complete with frog poison eye drops). Feeling very much like the odd man out, I sat quietly, biting my tongue and gripping my wife’s knee in a way that I hoped would be interpreted as “Honey, maybe it’s about time we left. I don’t really feel like watching jungle tribes hunt monkeys with blowpipes this Thanksgiving.” But my wife was too busy biting her own tongue to engage in such in-depth interpretations of knee squeezing.

Clarification: I imagine that these relatively untouched peoples have incredible cultures that deserve to be preserved and protected. I am just not particularly interested in learning about them over Thanksgiving dessert.

A few minutes into our holiday feature film, my worst fears were being realized. Our revelries had descended to a point where we were watching five-year-olds try to catch something called a “Goliath tarantula” (two words that were never, ever, EVER meant to go together). I personally am a lousy cook; and yet that day I learned how to slow-roast a Goliath tarantula over an open fire. This is a factoid I pray I never have to use. The documentary continued, and we learned about people who breastfed their pet monkeys, dressed up like birds of paradise to attract chicks (haha), and climbed 150 feet up trees to gather honey for their villages. I felt a bit cheated on this last one, because while the documentary went to great lengths (heights?) to show how to get up a tree, it did not show how to get down. My best guess is a parachute made out of leaves. Or hitching a ride on the camera crew’s helicopter.

One of the last segments was about a tribe that built its houses high in the treetops. These people were literally out on a limb. And, on a more figurative level, so were my wife and I. Like the Pilgrims and these tribes, we were surviving, growing, and learning in a strange environment. These people had built their home in a tree. The Pilgrims had built their home in a “New World.” My wife and I were building our home away from our parents and with each other. And that is pretty incredible.

But you know what? Maybe we can be adventurous the rest of the year. It can be exhausting living life out on a limb, and sometimes you need to retreat to a safer, more stable environment. These days, our Thanksgivings look more traditional. We spend time with family and/or friends. We keep the adventure to a minimum. And we generally do not spend Thanksgiving on a limb.

And as far as food goes, we avoid tarantula.