Thanks for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is one of the few American holidays that hasn’t been destroyed by consumerism. Sure, there’s a Macy’s Day parade and a slew of football games on television. But how many turkeys can you eat? How many potatoes can you mash? How many paper Pilgrims can you stick on your window? There’s only so much of it that can be bought and sold in the marketplace.

Some people bend the holiday to make it very religious. Others merely give special thanks for their blessings. Some do a politico-religious turn on the holiday, using it as an occasion to be especially thankful for their freedom to practice their religion. But Thanksgiving cannot be distorted into a religion, and no single religion owns it. Whatever it’s history, it’s now a secular holiday where families and friends gather together and pig out.

When I was growing up, the history of Thanksgiving was an enormous part of the holiday. It was history written by and for white people and grammar schools taught the doctrine of noble, jaunty Pilgrims saved from starvation by kind, beneficent Native Americans. No one asked questions.

Revisionist history has exposed the Plymouth Rock Pilgrims to be ill prepared for the hardships encountered in the New World, and has been harsh on Europeans in general. That the Native Americans prevented them from starving to death ranks among the cruelest ironies in history, for Europeans, of course, would turn around and slaughter them mercilessly — as if they were today’s turkeys.

Years ago, I knew a supercilious woman who took umbrage when my husband innocently wished her a happy Thanksgiving. She unleashed a loud PC rant about the European genocide of Native Americans, the wretchedness of the holiday for the turkeys, and all the rest. She, for one, was not going to celebrate it, and wanted my husband — who was already slinking away — to know this.

The Pilgrims were not good news for Native Americans, to be sure, but who is really so immune from the forces of history as to dare to condemn Europeans who came to the New World — as if people haven’t for centuries been forming hordes that moved inexorably across whole continents, pushing against and crushing other peoples in their wake?

History, whether considered the stuff of great individuals or abstract social, economic, and political forces (I myself think it combines both) — leaves very little room for innocents. Thanksgiving today is thankfully no longer about the Pilgrims. But in confronting the truth that Europeans were oftentimes cruel beyond belief as they invaded and conquered the Americas, we’ve lost something. By having to abandon our old story about the Pilgrims, for example, we no longer have a Thanksgiving myth — a Thanksgiving story that provides glue for our society — to cherish and celebrate.

All is not lost. Even though we’ve replaced the Pilgrims with Macy’s balloons (they’re a fully developed popular art form in themselves, around since 1927—Sponge Bob, by the way, is my current personal fave) and football (translation: men in front of the television, women in the kitchen), Thanksgiving remains a common, shared day when most stores are closed and almost all American families, no matter how fragile or fraught with tension, try their darnedest—for just a couple of hours—to achieve the dignified serenity depicted in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Unlike the weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year’s, Thanksgiving isn’t packed with parties and presents, or overloaded with sweets and alcohol. Nor do we feel the pressure to perform well for several days leading up to and following the holidays. It’s simply a huge feast on a single, designated day. Perhaps this is why most people experience it without Churchill’s black dog of depression hanging around. Christmas and New Year’s, on the other hand, are an entirely different story.

(Photo by Flickr Creative Commons contributor CarbonNYC)