I feel no need to apologize for liking turkey, the NFL, or my extended family, so I have no problem with expressing my disagreement with Thanksgiving naysayers. Thanksgiving is, by far, my favorite American holiday, and it’s probably because it has no real religious component. For me, it is a reason to get together with great uncles and aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews. We get together and enjoy each other’s company and recipes, without any ideological reason for doing so. We do it just because we want to and because we like to be together. We don’t have to succumb to any consumerism by buying each other gifts, nor do we have to play make-believe about the reality of fat men who ride in sleighs or rabbits that lay eggs. There is no pretention involved. In my family, we don’t celebrate the first Thanksgiving or give it any sacred place. The only thing we hold sacred is the tradition of gathering, and we gather for its own sake.
I find Thanksgiving naysayers to be the most uptight and boring of people. I’m sorry if you don’t like your family, but that is no reason to blame Thanksgiving. If you insist on seeing the holiday as some kind of whitewash of the genocide of Native Americans, I am also sorry, but I simply don’t look at Thanksgiving that way. For me, it is simply a secular excuse for the family to get together and celebrate being a family. And that makes it the best of all holidays.
What you said, Booman, but the retailers are doing their best to kill it. Went to Menard’s this morning to buy a replacement mailbox. I couldn’t even park as the lot is totally full of bargain hunters driving around looking for a spot, parking in the aisles waiting for a spot, parking in the exits waiting for a spot to open on the street…
I did buy a Black Friday item, a 25% off KVM switch, on-line, the only way to shop on Black Friday. If the site is sluggish, just fire up Pandora in another tab, lean back and sip your coffee.
BTW, to get back to politics, why can Newegg, TigerDirect, and Wal-mart have websites that can handle Black Friday/Cyber Monday traffic without crashing, but the Federal Government can’t? An investigation is in order, a REAL investigation, not a witchhunt.
Heard an interview with someone who worked on Washington state exchange. Said at one point that on a shopping site a person can browse without inputting all their info, one inputs info when ready to check out shopping cart.
But while we’re on the topic, what’s with the Oregon exchange???
That’s entirely correct!
Don’t know about the Oregon exchange. We don’t have one in Illinois, apparently because our “leaders” couldn’t decide on who should get the graft. So we’re stuck with the crappy Federal site. I wonder who got the graft for that? A guy I work with says the CEO of the prime contractor is a personal friend of Michelle Obama, but he belongs to the Tea Party, so I take it with a grain of salt.
We must live fairly close if you’re mentioning Menards. Working today – my company no longer provides holidays – but yesterday was just the two of us and way too much food. Wouldn’t go near a store today for any price.
I have come to hate Thanksgiving but not for the reasons you might suspect. It has become a time where I inevitably sit in traffic for a good 5 hours, or more – every year. And since I live in an area that my family would consider the end of the earth, having it here is out of the question. Tomorrow I get the joy of driving up to madame boran’s family, another 3-4 hours of driving, but with way less traffic. Sigh.
It goes beyond what you’re making it out to be. A lot of it has to do with the way the holiday is presented in primary education, particularly elementary education.
Also could be easier to see things in such stark terms when it wasn’t your people win eradicated.
Either way, I’m not against celebrating the holiday, and I see “the first thanksgiving” as more at roots with the Civil War, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to tell other protestors, particularly The United Americans of New England that “I’m sorry they feel that way.”
Also appropriate:
Better version;
I love it! That scene was one of the few attempts at a counter-narrative to the “First Thanksgiving” story to appear in popular culture, and funny as hell, too. 🙂
When I was in school, we were told that the Native Americans saved the Pilgrims from starvation out of the goodness of their hearts. What’s wrong with that?
Nothing. Except for leaving out the part that we repaid their generosity by stealing their lands, killing them, relocating those we didn’t kill to land we didn’t want, breaking every peace treaty they either willingly or were coerced to sign, assigning them to reservations, taking their children to unlearn their native ways and live in dreadful and often brutal institutional facilities. And that wasn’t even enough for us. If desired natural resources were discovered on the rez, we took that as well. We can’t even manage the collection of grazing rents on their lands and turn over the damn money to them. And that wasn’t even enough for some that have been stealing from the money that some tribes have earned from casinos.
Marie, do you really want to hit little kids with that? And it wasn’t the Pilgrims that did that. Or everyone with a white skin guilty for the crimes committed by other people with white skins? Maybe we should tell the little kids about the Holocaust during Octoberfest?
I’m not denying that all those bad things happened, but what was wrong with telling kids that Native Americans were helpful friends and teachers to the first white people who came here? Everything else we saw on TV and movies was about massacres of settlers and “hostile Indians”. OK, except for the Lone Ranger and Tonto.
No. Not for little kids; but it shouldn’t be excluded as they’re older. Sort of like when we in California study the missions — and were told mostly rot.
It’s probably a very good thing to teach little kids that Native Americans saved the immigrants from starving. Taught them how to eat and cook New World foods (one area where “globalization” has improved the health and palate of those native to most of Europe). Other than breads, our traditional Thanksgiving feasts are New World. And healthier than much of our regular fare.
I’m relieved, and I agree.
Tell my old man. We just played another round of “Steve Skwire Ruins the Holiday”.
Or rather, he did. I had Thanksgiving with friends. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
I live far and away from my family but that’s not to say that I don’t truly enjoy Thanksgiving. Yesterday brought the peace and yes, awe, of an extended hike up into the hills with clear skies and the sun out over a balmy 33 degree day (it’s predicted to be 7 on Monday)! It was a time to think of family past, stories, adventures, misadventures and goals for the future.
But the fun part was coming home to the various hillareous emails from friends and family of their day. Dear friend Hank whose 95 year old mother did fine until her new granddaughter in law announced that she’d found out she was a test tube baby with an unknown donor father. Gramma, who is a devout evangelical was overwhelmed and needed a stiff drink.
Family remembering the Thanksgiving at my house where I went down to the local Mission and scooped up a bunch of homeless men and brought them to watch MTV and eat turkey (yes, it was the 80’s). House was only 900 sq ft so we were friendly.
Friend who remembered my first turkey which slid out of the pan on the way to the dinnertable and slid across the whole length of the vinyl floor. Aghast, friend say, hell scoop it up I’m hungry!
Thanksgiving is a great day!
I agree with everything you said, except for the part about the lack of consumerism.
First, its a banner day for grocery stores because of our need to purchase everything for a large feast. I avoid grocery shopping on the days leading up to Thanksgiving like others avoid the Mall on Black Friday.
Secondly the holiday becomes a great excuse for those that are hosting to invest in their home – I have one friend who felt obligated to repainted their walls in advance of thanksgiving dinner, while another family in our neighborhood decided to purchase a new dining room set so they could accommodate more people.
Lastly, while exchanging gifts is not a requirement of Thanksgiving, it is still customary to bring something to the dinner…be it a plate to pass, or wine, or something as a token of appreciation.
At its core, the holiday should be about family and friends and it’s a great holiday that I love. However it is not bereft of consumerism.
They’re doing their best to commercialize Thanksgiving – this week “Black Friday” is the whole week, and I’m sure it’s going that way in the future – the “mindless shopping” part is turning into the more important event for many people than the turkey & gravy part. Which is a pretty accurate, if repulsive, reflection of our culture.
The “first Thanksgiving” stuff is pretty much an anachronism, similar to Columbus Day – how it’s taught in schools is truly offensive and repellant, but most adults don’t think about it. And because most of my family is Canadian, I never thought of the holiday that way anyway – in Canada it’s six weeks earlier, in mid-October, and so I always thought of its origins as a harvest holiday. Which it is. The fact that America celebrates a first harvest with a hearty side dish of genocide is a far less universal experience than harvest itself.
I figured if Black Friday is going to be a thing now, I might as well start designing a line of greeting cards. We’re kicking ourselves, though, since we didn’t start looking for a goat to sacrifice to the Dark Lord until Monday, and every place we called was sold out. We’re going to have to make do with a chicken.
I agree that the fact it has no religious component gives it a leg up on my list of holidays.
I consider this year’s get-together a success. There was absolutely no politics or religion discussed. And the holiday also fell on my grandma’s 99th birthday. So we all had a very good time combining the celebrations.
Have to say, though, that I do not look forward to Christmas. I just want it to be over already.
Oh, one more thing that made the day very special.
Baltimore 22
Pittsburgh 20
Steelers go down!!
Yeah, but did you see what happened here in Packerland? They went down 40-10.
Yeah, that was ugly. The Pack without Aaron Rodgers is a shell of a team.
I like the whole premise. Get with your extended family and spend a day or two just being thankful for the time you have together. It’s a shame it isn’t like that for everybody, or even every year for those who get to experience it. I personally haven’t been to a thanksgiving gathering that was worth a crap since probably the early 80s, but at least we had some good ones.
We just had our last family gathering where Madame and I could guarantee that all of our offspring would be with us. The days when we might be able to spend the day with the elder members of the extended family are rapidly coming to a close as well. Over the decades we’ve experimented with variations in meal preparation (there is a great deal of peer pressure regarding what is supposed to be the “right” way to do Thanksgiving, and I especially come from a long line of nonconformists, as it turns out). We also have a lot of good, spirited conversation on any of a number of topics. We love to debate, and rather than football we might prefer to put on some Brit comedies.
I learned from my parents many years ago to accept that the narrative upon which the holiday is based is pure and utter bullshit. Maybe that makes us “uptight and boring” (and also wondering if a subset of the prog bloggers have way too much leftover pie to throw). I’d like to think that it means I and my extended family view the holiday with open eyes.
The thing is, Thanksgiving is no more a whitewashing of the genocide than anything else we do. I totally agree that Americans need to know American history as it really happened, but there are less obnoxious ways to raise the issue.
Precisely. Thank you.
The only commercial interests that have successfully subverted Thanksgiving are grocery stores and restaurants. Event the Thanksgiving Day greeting cards fall kinda flat. And school supply stores don’t make much out of the pilgrim and pumpkin cutouts.
Now, there’s something to be thankful for.
Thanksgiving can be about drunk uncles, traffic, commercializations, genocide, or whatever you want to make it.
But if you can find the gratitude to be thankful for something, anything despite how f’d up your life or the world around you might be, then this holiday was meant for you.
It is a day to put the crap aside and give thanks to the higher power of you choosing for even the smallest little joys in our lives.
Pilgrims and Europeans are hardly perfect. Who is? But that was never the point.