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Thanksgiving 2010

"Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year. To the honest man, it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow."
--- Edward Sanford Martin (1856-1939), U.S. editor and publisher

Now that age 60 is on my horizon--- more accurately, up the street a couple of blocks--- I've started thinking a bit more about Thanksgiving's meaning (as opposed to its menu).  Of course, my thoughts about any topic tend to present themselves in the same way as those little white balls with the weekly lotto numbers, so here's some random observations about the Thanksgiving holiday that started rolling around in my skull this last week.

• ·       I think everybody's familiar with the origin of the holiday, when the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest by holding a feast and inviting the neighbors. They may not have called it Thanksgiving, and I guess it didn't have to have spiritual overtones, but let's face it: the Mayflower didn't book a random bunch of cruise enthusiasts. Most of these folks took the trip to escape religious persecution and just about everything they did had spiritual overtones. It's pretty much agreed that the purpose of this celebratory "harvest festival" was to thank God for getting them through a rough voyage and providing them with a good crop, and no matter what they called it, history's acknowledged it as the first Thanksgiving, since it led to later, and eventually, annual national days of thanks.
  
  So I think I'm safe in saying that Thanksgiving can be considered a religious holiday, even though it's not as overtly so as Christmas and Easter. Ostensibly it's a day where we pause, take a deep breath, and thank God for all the blessings He's given us, both as a nation and as individuals. Consequently, you'll have to endure my tendency break out the soap-box when it comes to the true meaning of these kinds of holidays. Honest, I'm not trying to be preachy... it happens whether I try or not.
  
  Like Christmas, the original purpose or spirit of the celebration might be hard to discern in the current culture. When a holiday's name is as short and to the point as "Thanksgiving", it's hard to pretend you're unclear on the concept, but somehow the meaning can still be watered down. My impression is that in the current popular culture, the Thanksgiving mission is accomplished as long as you find some things to say "thanks" for, without giving that thanks to anyone in particular.

• ·        If we were checking the old Thanks-o-Meter every year, we'd probably see some impressive numbers for the four-day holiday. Thanksgiving is one of those tricky holidays that's determined by a day of the week rather than a specific calendar date: it's always on a Thursday. And once the general populace started getting that Thanksgiving Thursday off from work, they all got together one night and decided that it wasn't worth coming back to work on Friday, and that's been the case ever since. Thanksgiving's unique that way... on any other, date-driven holiday like the Fourth of July or Christmas or Elvis' Birthday, if the weekday on which it falls is a Tuesday or Thursday, it's an unspoken agreement among workers to take the Monday or Friday off. In fact, they spend much of the preceding work-week formulating the excuse to take the extra day. With Thanksgiving, it's understood and official.  My theory is that it's because Thanksgiving is also the day where it's officially okay to cook more for one meal than any of the participants can possibly eat in one day... and also officially okay give it a shot anyway. Consequently, the Friday following Thanksgiving is needed for extra digestion time, and to address the serious issue of leftovers and how they'll be prepared and distributed in the next couple of weeks.

• ·        In my exhaustive research on Wikipedia (motto: "Go ahead; write it for us; we trust you"), I discovered that President Lincoln first declared an official national Thanksgiving in 1863, and it's been celebrated annually in the US since then. But for eight decades following Lincoln's declaration, it was a year-to-year presidential declaration, and up until 1939, it was designated as the last Thursday of November. But 1939 was one of those years where there were five Thursdays in November (which happens occasionally due to sunspots or atmospheric conditions or something). So President Roosevelt declared the 1939 Thanksgiving to be the fourth Thursday, the idea being that the Depression economy could use a boost by adding a week to the traditional Christmas shopping season. (Back then, it was considered bad form to advertise for Christmas before Thanksgiving... isn't that quaint?)
  
  It turns out it was a pretty big deal. Some Americans weren't crazy about having their calendars messed with--- there were parades, football games, and other local events that were scheduled well in advance of the announced change--- and since a Presidential declaration isn't legally binding (read the fine print), only 23 states recognized the earlier Thanksgiving that year; 22 states ignored the declaration; and the remaining progressive states, recognizing a golden opportunity when it fell in their laps, decided to go with both days.
  
  The November of the following two years both had four Thursdays, but Roosevelt stuck to his guns and declared Thanksgiving to be the third Thursday, and, again, some states went with it and some states didn't. But Congress couldn't stand this pandemonium--- Germany and Japan were demanding a lot of attention at the time--- and it finally declared that, starting with 1942, Thanksgiving was an official national holiday, celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November (regardless of those mutant Novembers where there were five Thursdays).

• ·        The overall Thanksgiving holiday also plays host to "Black Friday", which is considered the starting gun for the Christmas shopping season. I've heard that the term was coined because it's one of the busiest shopping days of the year, and many retailers "go into the black" on that day. Still, it seems like an unfortunate choice of monikers for a day that's good for the business. Usually, putting the word "black" before a particular day signifies that something's gone terribly wrong. For example, I saw a movie called Black Christmas and it was about a serial killer that comes to visit for the holidays.
  
  I'm thinking that the term "Black Friday" was first used by the rank and file retail personnel, and they probably meant it exactly like it sounds. Honestly... I used to be in retail, and, as good as it is for business, the day after Thanksgiving is like an annual Guadalcanal for the employees on the floor. The positive spin to the term probably came later, after the general public caught wind of it and the retailers wanted to credibly claim it was an expression of customer appreciation.

• ·        People who know me can tell you that I'm a bit ambivalent about Thanksgiving, in much the same way that I am about Christmas. The holidays seem to own a lot of things that I'd just as soon enjoy all year round.
  
  Turkey, for instance. I really like roast turkey and its various post-holiday permutations generated by leftovers, but I don't see a lot of turkey dinners being prepared outside of the holiday season. Granted, I've never actually prepared a turkey myself; it's always been done by my wife, or my mom before that, or by my brother-in-law's family that we mooch off of every year. But it doesn't seem like that much work to me... someone pops it out of the oven and puts it on the table and we all dig in. I wouldn't mind a turkey dinner every couple or three months, but people with limited vision (usually the ones doing the cooking) seem to have locked turkey dinners into Thanksgiving and/or Christmas.

• ·        Getting together with family is another example. Nowadays, once the kids are grown, families can be scattered geographically... for example, we live in California but my mom and brother are back in Virginia; and up until relatively recently, my wife's parents lived in Florida (when dealing with me, 3000 miles away seems to be the sweet spot). Maybe it's just me, but it appears the holidays generate a  lot of pressure to get the family together. That's not a bad thing, but do we really need the holidays to prompt that? It sure causes a lot of stress on the airline industry, as the country's population shuffles itself like a deck of cards in the space of a few days.
  
  I'm kind of nostalgic for the days when the family circle (parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and other tag-alongs) tended to stay in the same general, accessible geographic area... and, consequently, were a part of one's life all year round. You didn't wait for the annual Christmas newsletter to find out what was going on; you dropped by and looked in occasionally, went to the kids' birthday parties; gave each other rides when the car was in the shop. Some say I'm looking back on a past that never existed... but it did for me, when I was growing up with my family. Admittedly, not everything was rose-colored... my dad used to sit on the front porch without a shirt on and make fun of my friends; and he'd eat whole pies out of the tin before I could get a piece... but overall, it wasn't bad.

• ·        Current movies, when they deal with the holidays, confuse me. They seem to promote the idea that seeing family during the holidays is important. But the families in these kinds of movies are populated by zany, eccentric crackpots that, ultimately, end up being loveable... as long as you only have to see them once a year.  Usually in these movies, the lesson the main (normal) characters learn is to hug their family instead of throttling them; the protagonists become better people because they learn to tolerate the family. Not bad, I guess, but I wouldn't want to see it stitched on a sampler. I guess I'd like to see more home-for-the-holidays movies where the main family value is that the family is valued.

• ·        In general, our culture seems to present the holidays as the time to don an attitude of family unity and general goodwill; sometimes I wonder if that implies we can pack it away in January and have a free pass the rest of the year.

With the above observations, I don't want to give the impression that I have a cynical view of the holidays. I do... but I'd rather not give that impression, which only adds more weight to my reputation as a unsentimental curmudgeon. And I've got to say [Warning! Potentially Offensive Observation Ahead!] that, as someone who's been blessed with salvation through Jesus Christ, I've got absolutely nothing to be unthankful for... it's just that the sinful nature for which I've been forgiven also makes me a poor example of the practice-what-you-preach discipline.*   Really, it's not that I don't like the holidays... I just like them all year round. It's sort of like that old joke where a youngster asks his parents, "There's a Mother's Day and a Father's Day... when is Children's Day?" and the parents reply in unison, "Every day is Children's Day." It would be great if we could take it for granted that every day is a day for thanksgiving.

And I know there's plenty of folks out there with their hearts in the right place... and if they'll tell me where that place is, I'll do my best to put mine there too.

So have a great Thanksgiving... one that keeps on going, and going, and going....