The Guy Side: Holidays that rhyme with happy

Everybody needs at least one crappy holiday. A "kill me now" holiday. A holiday so utterly devoid of joy you're sure the next knock at the door will be "Candid Camera" or the Black Plague.

QUIZ: How much do you know about Thanksgiving?

They make great stories later on, but that isn't why you need them. Crappy holidays are a rite of passage. Like fraternity initiations, but with less vomiting. Most of the time.

My Crappy Thanksgiving came back in 1989. It wasn't my first holiday away from family, but it felt the most remote. A rogue bachelor, on assignment in San Diego, I was taken in like a stray pup by the family of my kindest co-worker. They were very nice, but I bounced across the surface of their half-told stories, knowing looks and family in-jokes like a castaway stone. Across the country, my Dad's bellowed cooking pronouncements, my sister's stuffing critique and my brother's withering parade commentary were all packed into one brief, tinny collect call.

The holiday wasn't just bad. It was gone. Everyone put a good face on it. (Admitting otherwise would add huge, heaving sobs to the problem.) But after dinner, as soon as I cordially could, I went out for a walk.

Walk any warm-weather neighborhood in the Thanksgiving twilight, and you'll hear a kind of music: the high, treble scrapes of forks on china; the squeak of chairs as diners adjourn; the low tones of men who have eaten too much and the sing-song of women admonishing them. House after house, block after block, as I passed I kept hearing these songs: conversations bubbling into laughter, silverware clicking and plates clattering under faucets open full blast. It was like they were singing out of my family hymnal.

Suddenly, a dark street of strangers felt a little like home.

So, I headed back, determined to make the best of it. A weird thing happens when you accept that your holiday is a train wreck: It immediately improves. As the sidewalk squares rolled beneath my feet, they became film frames, replaying every fond Thanksgiving memory I'd ever had: the "Trapped Turkey Fiasco" of 1967; the Deviled Egg Fracas that kept throwable hors d'oeuvres from our home for much of the '70's; my brother's yearly insistence that "real cranberry sauce" is shaped like the Del Monte can.

The Who's in Whoville were right! I'd never understood how they could come out singing after the Grinch had robbed them blind. (I had assumed he'd missed a liquor cabinet.) But they understood what I learned that night: The good holidays never leave you. They remain behind the emergency glass of memory, to be broken in case of despair.

I would never have seen that if my own Thanksgiving didn't stink so very much.

I hope your Thanksgiving doesn't stink. I hope it's more fodder for the memory bank. But if it does, remember that the bad holidays are like ring settings. They hold the good ones up for the jewels that they are.