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 itThere 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.P…

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