212. Thanksgiving

 

Thanksgiving is a distinctly North American holiday that we Americans celebrate in November and our Canadian cousins celebrate in October in conjunction with what we Yanks call Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day. For we Americans the whole idea is to give thanks for our ancestry and their arrival on these shores along with a bountiful harvest after a difficult period preceding all that. It’s important to give thanks for surviving tempestuous events in our lives. Our Puritan ancestors celebrated what we now call the first Thanksgiving a year after their arrival in Massachusetts Bay. I love that story (highly mythologized) that has natives and colonists celebrating in harmony, but I know that our land has always been a land of tensions and conflict settled by obnoxious human beings bent on extreme tribalism. I’m still thankful for the holiday and grateful that we North Americans celebrate it.

While it’s over this year, my pastor did call it one of the few unsullied holidays. I suspect he meant that it’s unsullied by commercialism. That does seem to be true. About the only commercialism that comes with the holiday is the sale of turkeys, cranberries, and other autumnal foods that we enjoy cooking in a variety of ways. If you’re lucky you might find a few table decorations on sale, but typically those are overwhelmed and hidden between Halloween and Christmas decorations, if they’re even there at all.

This year we went to Seattle to celebrate. We actually ate Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant, something my wife and I had only done once before (before kids). I do, however, remember working at such banquets for Thanksgiving during my four years in college. It meant my own festivities with family had to be squeezed into a portion of the day instead of a full day of eating and being with family. This year the celebrations were just a quiet gathering of the four of us. Of course, we still had plenty of pumpkin and squash for treats and we did cook a turkey before the holiday for leftovers. I think what we ended up doing was extending the holiday to a longer eating festival.

It’s definitely the eating that I like about Thanksgiving. Of course, the gathering of friends and family is super important and fun as well but if it weren’t for the shared need to eat we probably wouldn’t do the big gatherings. In fact, we didn’t do the big gathering thing this year. We did lots of little gatherings here and there with friends and family. To me, that was just as fun because we had already started the everything-pumpkin season and then we added the turkey and cranberries. Now, when you get to the day after Thanksgiving, the crazy commercialization of Black Friday begins. I am not a big participant in Black Friday shopping and this year was no exception, but we did go to IKEA on that Saturday just because we were in Seattle. The shelves had already been cleaned out! It’s ok to do the shopping thing if you go slow, have fun, and remain happy. The whole idea of being thankful should prevail.

It’s not like we haven’t been going through an extended rough patch for the past couple of years with the pandemic, but I still have a lot to be thankful for. I’m thankful that I have remained healthy and been able to keep my family healthy. I’m thankful that I was financially stable and able to retire so that I could keep my family and myself healthy. I’m thankful that I have enough to do and a creative mind so that I am not bored. I’m thankful that my family and friends have weathered this storm of the pandemic fairly well and that we are able to get out and about now. And I’m grateful for this season that has brought me happiness and for Time magazine and its little article that encouraged me to think about what I’m grateful for.