Thanksgiving is a holiday simultaneously beloved, ignored and held in contempt.
For many, it is an occasion to gorge oneself on sweet, succulent turkey, a meat that, for one, can and should be enjoyed year-round, but also a dish that wasn’t even served at the First Thanksgiving.
For others, Thanksgiving is that holiday sandwiched between Halloween and Christmas, with all the discomfort of rubbing elbows with more obscure members of the family but none of the gift-getting that makes Christmas worthwhile. And for some, it’s an occasion to suck all the fun out of the room with a diatribe about the United States’ policy towards Native Americans.
However you celebrate Thanksgiving, whether cheerfully surrounded by family and friends or not at all, I think it bears remembering that Thanksgiving – far from being a stopover to Christmas – is one of the most important holidays on the modern calendar.
In a day and age like this, where even the relatively poor among us live in what is comparatively the lap of luxury by historical standards, we hear very little gratitude and magnanimity and a great deal of bitterness, entitlement, ingratitude and selfishness.
Both the young and the old, rich and poor alike, seem to never be contented with the flashy conveniences and unparalleled luxuries of modern life. At the very least, we don’t act as if we are.
It could not hurt to recall the circumstances of that First Thanksgiving. Of the 102 colonists who set out from England for the harrowing voyage to the New World, only 53 survived the first winter, famine and disease that had claimed the lives of the rest of the pilgrims. After such an ordeal, the Plymouth colonists, alongside 90 or so Wampanaog, celebrated their first harvest in America.
I greatly doubt that if you, reader, had been shipped from one continent to another in a rickety boat only to arrive cold and hungry in a hostile land where half of your friends and family died in less than a year, you would be very thankful.
Say what you will about that strange, austere sect that landed in Plymouth, Massachussets in 1620, they might have lacked for some things, but not a sense of perspective.
It was that same sense of enlightened gratitude that gave birth to the holiday of Thanksgiving as we know it. While Sarah Josepha Hale had been writing presidents for years agitating for the recognition of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, it wasn’t until the term of President Lincoln wherein, in the midst of the Civil War, he proclaimed the obscure New England holiday was worthy of celebration by the wider country.
In the year 1863, the same year that played host to the costliest battle of the war at Gettysburg, the nation was able to rally around a common theme, and that theme was gratitude, in the midst of sorrow, for the blessings that could be counted.
It is that sense of perspective which would do us some good to recover. Despite what slights, real or imagined, you’ve had, and despite what suffering, great or small, you’ve experience this year, if you’re reading this you’re at the very least alive and that’s something to be thankful for.
Reject, dear reader, the impulse to pass over another Thanksgiving without calling yourself to a kind of radical reflection about the blessings, privileges and turns of good fortune you’ve had over the year.
Once you’ve given it a good deal of introspection, enjoy all the turkey you can manage in an afternoon. It’s a feast day, after all.
And, if you must, go forth and decorate that tree for Christmas.
Photo Credit / Wikimedia Commons
