Nanny tells a 5-year-old that she is going to celebrate Thanksgiving with her family, and her boss gets very mad at her: ‘A is just learning how holidays and calendars work, and now you've confused her’

A five-year-old's first lesson about disappointment might be a misunderstanding about Thanksgiving and who'll celebrate it

There is a point in everyone's life when we learn our way of life isn't the only way of life. Canadian Thanksgiving falls in October while American Thanksgiving falls in November. Some countries celebrate Halloween, and others don't. That might be hard to comprehend for a small child, but it's an excellent opportunity for them to learn a valuable lesson about cultural differences, traditions, and expectations.

Some adults think their role is to protect children from disappointment, rather than taking it as an ordinary emotional experience that can be explained and managed. Holidays are full of expectations about what families should do, even when those traditions are entirely optional.

We should all learn at some point that the calendar is not a fixed, universal system, and that every family can attribute different meanings to different traditions. They feel inevitable when we're inside them, but a change in perspective reveals how contingent they are. After all, they are literally invented. They are inherited, and we might take them as natural, but they're not.

Parenting is exhausting, and having to go through yet another life-altering lesson with your child might be something you want to avoid for a while, but life has its ways of testing us and sending us circumstances we can't control. That's part of life too: receiving information from the Other and learning how to deal with it.

We can't live perfectly curated lives and avoid everything challenging that can come our way. We necessarily have to learn to deal with it. Thanksgiving is a very peculiar holiday because it comes wrapped in expectations about how happy families should look and behave, but because of that, it's a very good holiday to teach our children what traditions mean, how they look for different people, and that being thankful can take many forms.

At any rate, we are free to choose which traditions to participate in, and children should learn that as well. Holidays, languages, and looks are all charming entry points into how children learn that the world isn't organized by their family's rules, and that what feels universal is often cultural.

Of course, there are many people who never fully understood this and are already full-grown adults. That's why we have so much intolerance and cultural conflict around the world (I obviously understand it's much deeper than that, but well).

Let's let everyone opt out of whatever they want to opt out of. And try not to make people feel pressured into celebrating. That's the best knowledge we can pass on. Not everyone is willing or able to participate in the cultural ideal of what a happy family should look like. Maybe those who don't celebrate Thanksgiving are the most thankful during the year; you never know.

Disappointment around holidays is normal, and sooner or later we all learn about it; it's an important part of life. Can we choose what traditions we want to participate in?