NOVEMBER 25, 2021 – Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday.
First, its centerpiece is culinary abundance, and at the center of the centerpiece is a stuffed turkey, my favorite land-based food.
Second, I enjoy the story of the Original Feast, which occurred exactly four centuries ago this year. However mythicized and romanticized, it’s a heart-warming tale about the positive in human nature: a bunch of ostracized white people who, having endured the perils of an Atlantic crossing and having survived (well, not all of them) a year of disease and deprivation, broke bread and wishbones with indigenous “friendlies” who’d saved the butts of the pale, ill-prepared, religious outliers in funny hats and buckled shoes.
Third, Thanksgiving kicks off an extra long weekend and introduces my second favorite holiday period, the five-week-long Xmas and New Year’s extravaganza. (The year-end festivities hold second, never first, position because when the decorations come down, the next long holiday isn’t until the Fourth of July, when summer is officially half over, at least in northern climes).
The great thing about Thanksgiving in current times is that it’s hard to politicize completely. Sure, rightwing radicals point to the Pilgrims’ direct descendants: the Founding Fathers, Ronald Reagan, and You-Know-Who, while well-educated lefties condemn the same Pilgrims for causing the demise of indigenous people, friendly and unfriendly. But even among radical right-wingers and learned lefties, who can fault Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade followed by a day dedicated to . . . buying more stuff?
More pointedly, who in a rational frame of mind thinks “thanks” is insanely leftwing or inescapably rightwing? When the host of a Thanksgiving dinner says, “Let’s go around the table and tell what we’re thankful for,” no one assembled rolls their eyes and shouts uncharitably that the host is a detestable Republican or an incorrigibly radical socialist leftist. No. Everyone happily complies and says something halfway appropriate, OCD Packer fans of Arrogant Rodgers excepted.
None of which is to diminish the genocide in which the Pilgrims—and hundreds of thousands of other European newcomers to the continent—participated, wittingly, with rifles and plowshares, or unwittingly, with disease. For the sake of Squanto, however, the full price of penance for what happened many generations ago would require 98.4% of us 330 million Americans to migrate back whence our ancestors came—unless immigrants who arrived after the genocide plus descendants of slaves are deemed exempt. We must study and acknowledge the good, the bad, and the ugly in our history, but however we assess the net, bottom, historical line, individually or collectively, perhaps we can reunite around the concept, at least, of national thanksgiving.
For what am I thankful this time around? Plenty. I’m thankful for the “plenty” that fills my life—not as in “plenty of stuff” but as in the wonders of this world, the love and inspiration that fill my relationships, and for the advent, so to speak, of “Ho, ho, ho!” . . . in red and white without the blues.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
