Valley Commentary : Holiday Orphans Need to Have a Day of Their Own : A little ingenuity helps solve the problem and create a new celebration when relatives have reserved all of the festive days on which special family meals are made.

This is the hardest time of year for us holiday orphans.

Decorations are everywhere. Ornaments abound. And friends and family have made their famous Thanksgiving and Christmas dishes with recipes that have been in the family for years.

Once again I realized that short of prying the list of ingredients for Grandma’s lace cookies from her fingers or shorting the lights on Auntie’s tree, I would again be the guest.

So this year the day after Thanksgiving I cooked my first turkey. Why tackle such a task when I was so full of turkey I could sprout wings? Because I am a woman in search of a holiday.

In my family, all the holidays are taken. Mom has custody of religious occasions (Jewish only) and any named for a saint including Valentine’s and St. Patrick’s. Aunt Lila takes care of Christmas Day, and Aunt Elsie, after 32 years of basting and baking, is synonymous with Thanksgiving. My sister-in-law, Susie, also does Thanksgiving, as well as Christmas Eve, Halloween and Labor Day. Everyone does the Fourth of July.

Clearly, I needed to use some initiative or be a holiday orphan forever.

So I created my own annual Holiday Of My Own Day. It is the Friday following Thanksgiving. I expect it to become wildly popular. Here’s why.

In addition to appeasing us holiday orphans, the Holiday of My Own Day will appease everyone’s craving for leftovers, which are to Thanksgiving what trees are to Christmas and bunnies are to Easter.

Moreover, we need another holiday because Thanksgiving weekend is unbelievably long. Forget those trench-coated reporters in airline terminals telling us it’s the heaviest travel weekend of the year. I and most everyone I know never leave town. How many people can fit into airplanes in one weekend anyway? The point is, there are lots of people around with nothing to do the Friday after Thanksgiving who would be thrilled to go to another dinner.

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My annual dinner is not like Thanksgiving, which most of us attend in Pavlovian fashion. We can pretty much bet that next year’s Thanksgiving dinner will be just like this year’s (OK, so this year Elsie didn’t have her cream puffs in the shape of swans, but she won’t make that mistake again). Face it, if we don’t like the food or the company, there is little chance next year is going to be much better.

People at my annual dinner attend because they really want to be there. And, as the host, I invite just those folks I really want to come. That’s a sure-fire combination for a successful evening.

Finally, while we may want to believe that everyone’s holiday table looks like a Norman Rockwell painting, this is the day of the extended family--extended all over the place. I, for example, am much closer to certain friends than many of the family members with whom I share festive meals. My dinner gives me a chance to celebrate with these relatives-of-choice.

Greeting card companies and Florists Transworld Delivery love holidays and will certainly pounce on this one. That’s usually all it takes to get one off the ground.

Guys at freeway off-ramps could sell Holiday Of My Own Day bouquets. Maybe the President will endorse my day by lighting the White House oven.

And even if my day doesn’t get the recognition it deserves, my relatives can relax. I’ve found my holiday niche and promise no longer to covet theirs.

By the way, my first turkey dinner was flawless. But after cooking for two days and fretting over every detail, I’m sure glad that the Holiday Of My Own Day dinner comes just once a year.