The age of Thanksgiving, and how to survive it

My "age of innocence" ended on a New Year's Day, back in the early '90s, when I heard a police call about a house fire in southern New Jersey. I was an ambitious, but somewhat undisciplined reporter in a rural area - rural for New Jersey - and I paid attention to police calls as often as I cleaned my refrigerator.

It wasn't just a lack of discipline, I should say. The cackles from the scanner normally sounded like the speaker at a McDonald's drive-thru. All you heard was the buzz. Something about this call, a four-alarm fire, made it louder than all the others.

I drove south, riding along Route 9 and through the southern New Jersey towns that a friend of mine once called "Appalachia by the Sea." They didn't have the big box-shaped shopping centers that New Jersey is known for. They were houses that looked like they were sinking into the ground. When we got to where needed to go, all we saw were these one-story ranchers, each of them looking like little tinderboxes just asking for abuse.

The photographer and I got out of the car, saw the charred house and walked up to it.

A man popped out and saw me and Dave, the photographer. The guy had a big gut and big red beard, a kind of scary looking guy who I didn't really have time to look at.

"Get 'em!" he yelled, and a big, drooling dog came running out, chasing me and Dave. I literally jumped on top of my car, and watched the dog leaping up at me, saliva forming around his mouth. The guy with the big gut laughed as he puffed on his smoke.

Dave? He was doing what he always did: He took pictures.

I went to the police department later, at Little Egg Harbor Township, N.J. I went in there with the prejudice that this is the kind of thing that happens there, that there was something about this class of people that made them not respect holidays. Who would burn their house on New Year's Day?

This was, of course, before meth labs were in vogue, so there was little chance that they blew up themselves.

"You should see what it's like on Thanksgiving," the chief said. "That's the worst day of the year."

He was right. Later, I looked back at old clips from The Press of Atlantic City library. Something happened on Thanksgiving every day for years. They weren't just petty crimes, either. Murders, armed robberies - they were Law and Order stuff, set in Appalachia.

You'd think holidays would be the easy time of year. People get time off, and get paid for it. They get to go somebody's house - hopefully - and eat somebody else's food.

But a lot of people don't get all that, and when they don't, they get lonely. And when they get lonely, they get depressed.

And if they're already lonely and depressed, they could even be angry. If they have to meet with family - family they don't like - the encounters could lead to what the police dispatchers call "domestic disputes." In the years after that fire, I covered a lot of these kinds of crimes, and my image of Thanksgiving changed from turkey and stuffing to crime and punishment.

Family issues inspired me to write about mental health. But maybe it was more than that: Maybe it was the experience of dealing with the average person, and how the holidays they have don't ever symbolize the joy and peacefulness of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Indeed, in this recession, a lot more people are closer to those people in Little Egg Harbor than they think. A lot of people lack money - last year, my brother-in-law joked that we're all going to be eating peanut butter for Thanksgiving this year, and he wasn't too far off - and that added stress is bound to make things busy for police departments across the country.

Worse yet, it could make things busier for mental health professionals who are dealing with people who just don't understand what is making them angry, depressed and lonely.

Mental Health America, a leading mental health advocacy group, understands this, and is trying to fight it and deal with it.

Many factors can cause the holiday blues, according to MHA: stress, fatigue, unrealistic expectations, over-commercialization, financial constraints and the inability to be with one’s family and friends.

The demands of shopping, parties, family reunions and house guests also contribute to feelings of tension. People may also develop other stress responses such as headaches, excessive drinking, over-eating and difficulty sleeping.

Even more people experience post-holiday let down after January 1. This can result from disappointments during the preceding months compounded by the excess fatigue and stress, according the MHA.

Mental Health America offers some suggestions:

- Keep expectations for the holiday season manageable. Try to set realistic goals for yourself. Pace yourself. Organize your time. Make a list and prioritize the important activities.

- Be realistic about what you can and cannot do. Don’t put the entire focus on just one day (i.e., Thanksgiving Day). Remember that it’s a season of holiday sentiment, and activities can be spread out to lessen stress and increase enjoyment.

- Remember the holiday season does not banish reasons for feeling sad or lonely; there is room for these feelings to be present, even if the person chooses not to express them.

- Leave “yesteryear” in the past and look toward the future. Life brings changes. Each season is different and can be enjoyed in its own way. Don’t set yourself up in comparing today with the “good ol’ days.”

- Do something for someone else. Try volunteering some of your time to help others.

- Enjoy activities that are free, such as taking a drive to look at holiday decorations, going window shopping or making a snowman with children.

- Be aware that excessive drinking will only increase your feelings of depression.

- Try something new. Celebrate the holidays in a new way.

- Spend time with supportive and caring people. Reach out and make new friends, or contact someone you haven’t heard from in a while.

- Save time for yourself! Recharge your batteries! Let others share in the responsibility of planning activities.

My own personal suggestion: If you're going light anything up, light up a firecracker or something. Don't play with matches, and stay away from meth.