Thankfulness and Thanksgiving
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“After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”
Oscar Wilde
“The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.”
Abraham Maslow
When people lament whatever happened to late-night comedy, I blame Jon Stewart. I never saw the wit in progressive rants accompanied by yelling or exaggerated eye rolls at the camera. It was not that political comedy was new. Mark Twain was doing it more than a hundred years ago. But that is the rub: comedy is supposed to be funny. Stewart brought a shrill, shrieking form of political ranting that was more leftist reassurance than humor. Here is a case in point around Thanksgiving:
“I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.”
Forget the historical inaccuracies. It was not funny on its merits, and like the bulk of the new left-wing comedy, if one can call it that, it missed the point.
Christmas is celebrated in many places throughout the globe. Most countries have an Independence Day of some sort; in France, it is Bastille Day, and in Mexico, it is September 16. Many people have celebrations to remember those who gave their lives in service, similar to the US’s Memorial Day (in the United Kingdom, it is called Remembrance Day). Moreover, though many nations still have harvest festivals, Thanksgiving is unique to Canada, the United States, and just a few other places.
Almost every American has some sense of Thanksgiving as a holiday modeled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the English colonists (Pilgrims) of Plymouth and the Wampanoag people. But because this holiday could be shaped, like much of America itself, the traditions we understand are slightly different from reality. According to Kristin Salaky, writing for Delish, “The newly settled Europeans did not originally invite the Native Americans to their feast. Ousamequin, leader of the Wampanoag Tribe, had declared an alliance with the settlers, and members of the tribe were showing up to honor a mutual defense pact; they’d heard the Pilgrims shooting their guns in celebration and thought they were in combat. After some talk, they decided to spend three days together and join the feast.”
And why an alliance? The Wampanoag needed help from conflicts with other Native American tribes and felt that family colonists, as opposed to predominantly male opportunists that comprised much of the Western Hemisphere’s imperial settlements to that date, might prove fruitful allies. There is a myth that Native Americans lived in some form of harmony prior to the arrival of Europeans. This was not true in South America, Mexico, the Southeast, and certainly not in New England. The Native Americans had their own agenda, just like the Pilgrims.
The term Thanksgiving itself derives from a religious connotation. New England colonists were accustomed to regularly celebrating “Thanksgivings,” days of prayer during which they thanked God for blessings such as the end of a drought.
History geeks might add that it was not immediately declared a national holiday at the inception of the Republic. George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison all issued proclamations urging Americans to observe days of Thanksgiving, both for general good fortune and for particularly momentous events (the adoption of the US Constitution, in Washington’s case; the end of the War of 1812, in Madison’s). However, the US Congress left Thanksgiving declarations to the states. Some objected to the national government’s involvement in religious observance. For example, Southerners were slow to adopt a Yankee custom, and others took offense over the days used to hold partisan speeches and parades. A national Thanksgiving Day seemed more like a source of controversy than a unifying force.
With the inception of the Civil War, Thanksgiving Day became an official holiday. As Rahm Emmanuel once noted, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and Abraham Lincoln and a Republican-dominated legislature used this one. On October 3, 1863, Lincoln proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving to be celebrated on Thursday, November 26, partly to create greater national unity and somewhat to distract from the carnage of the war.
That is the history, but what does the day mean to us today? Considering that this is America circa 2024, many Americans call it Turkey Day and think of it in terms of football games and naps due to the tryptophan inherent in the giant bird. It is also that day right before “Black Friday.” I need new podcast equipment, but I have been placed in purchase purgatory lest I miss a great deal on that day. Moreover, Amazon will broadcast its second football game on Black Friday in a unique bit of heresy. I would protest this blasphemy, but when a company has an annual profit (not revenue, PROFIT) of $225 billion, the sky’s the limit. They could make Patrick Mahomes and whatever sad Raider QB happens to play get the Amazon smiling logo tattooed on their biceps, and the NFL poohbahs would smile along, “That wacky Jeff, what will he do next!” while lighting cigars with their Bezos bucks. I would add that Mahomes plays for the Chiefs, but he will not see action on Thanksgiving. You cannot make this stuff up.
As the Stewart quote notes, Thanksgiving is, like all institutions and celebrations created before the 1960s, for many on the left, a thing of controversy. An article from The Nation last year asked, “Should We Keep Celebrating Thanksgiving.” Written by Sean Sherman and Chase Iron Eyes, of which I assume the latter writer is Native American, how authentic. The article states, “By exploring the Indigenous perspective on Thanksgiving, we can not only discern some of the nuances of decolonization but gain a deeper understanding of American history. The sanitized version of Thanksgiving neglects to mention the violence, land theft, and subsequent decimation of Indigenous populations. This causes tremendous distress to those of us who are still reeling from the trauma of these events to our communities.”
I will not go into all the ways, touched on above, that Native Americans performed these types of cruelty on each other, but instead focus on why articles of this tenor gain purchase. Historical revisionism and dispelling of myths are more about the people who deride the holiday than the actual history. Looking for relevance, they assign themselves the role of moral interpreter for the rest of us. Think about that power. They get to upend 160 years of tradition and national unity to be replaced by something they conceive. The hoi polloi, the plebeians, and the unwashed masses may gather for Turkey and Pumpkin pie, but they do so in infamy. The enlightened, ennobled, nee, awoken in their righteous indignation, get to decide what is acceptable and what is not. It is one thing to miss the point because one is ignorant. It is another to purposefully obscure the meaning because it would deprive these agitators of their specialness in this world.
So, what is Thanksgiving really about? Please allow a slight digression. I love to grocery shop. Not just the thought of what I will eat later, but in a real-time appreciative sense. Books and movies often portray people from previous eras parachuted into our time. From HG Welles’s Time Machine to the silly movie Encino Man to the forgettable Kate and Leopold, time travelers from previous centuries are amazed by cars, airplanes, and skyscrapers. I understand that sense of wonder for a pre-1850 figure, but it’s also the food for me.
Augustus Caesar may have founded the Roman Empire but never knew of chocolate or mashed potatoes with plenty of gravy. The Ming Emperor ruled tens of millions, but did he ever taste a strudel? The Sapa Inca Pachacuti reigned over an empireranging from Chile in the South to Colombia in the North but never tasted an orange or put turmeric in his soups.
And these were the top one-tenth of 1 percent. After the agricultural revolution around 14,000 years ago, humans began to shrink in size because their diet contracted to a few local grains: wheat in the Mediterranean, rice in East Asia, and corn in the Americas. Meat? Only on special occasions. Varied meat? Rarely. Famine? Not so rare.
Before the 1700s, a bad harvest meant deprivation; two bad ones led to starvation. In Peter Garnsey’s “Famine and Food Supply in the Ancient World,” the author catalogs the ever-present scourge, “Famine as a cataclysm struck Rome between 509 and 384 BCE about one year in nine, and reached a disastrous apex between 123-50 BCE of one in five years. Nearly every episode being attributable to civil war or disorder disrupting the mechanism of collection.” Even as late as 1845 in Ireland, famine was ever-present. This is an account from Rodger Cantwell’s writing after too much rain ruined his potato crop: “Over especially the next two years, life was miserable. We were always hungry and lost weight. England gave us some Indian corn and maize, but it was poorly ground and caused abdominal pain and diarrhea.” Cantwell goes on to note that over 1 million died in that famine, and the author himself was dead at 55 after emigrating to America.
Famine in today’s America? You and I can drive to the nearby Kroger’s, Whole Foods, Albertsons, Super Target, Walmart, or Trader Joe’s and see … everything. Our time traveler would not believe the availability and variety, not just in a superstore but in a run-of-the-mill neighborhood grocery.
And this focuses on the food. In the past, three things were probably going to kill you—the aforementioned lack of food, disease, and some soldiers. Thanks to the oddly maligned big Pharma, disease and plague are rare. Though armies are on the march throughout the world, one will not come through Phoenix, Chicago, or Philadelphia stealing your food, taking your family, and murdering you.
For me, the essence of Thanksgiving comes down to two words: abundance and gratitude. On the increasing rarity of when my family is together, we recite the Lord’s blessing, “Bless us these gifts for which we are about to receive, from thy bounty.” And never in the history of our species have we seen such bounty as has been granted to us by the United States of America.
And one other aspect of the original Thanksgiving feast. It is depicted as a group at a single large table, apocryphally or not. Who eats like this? Family and friends do. I am the father of adult children who, every year, become more enmeshed in the lives of their spouses, communities, and new friends and less with myself and my wife. This fusion of bounty and being with the people we love is the culmination of the value of this holiday.
This appreciation, even for secular types, has nothing to do with pilgrims cheating Native Americans of land, getting the white meat before Uncle Billy hogs its all, endless football games, or preparing for Black Friday with the comprehensive planning that Eisenhower brought to D-Day. Thanksgiving has everything to do with an aspect intrinsic to our nation: a great bounty. It has everything to do with loving those we care about. It is about appreciating and being grateful for what has been given.