21/11: Thanksgiving Day
Category: American Culture
Posted by: an okie gardener
Anybody out there who in elementary school put your hand on a piece of paper, traced around it, then colored in the Thanksgiving turkey? I thought so. Remember the construction paper Pilgrim hats, bonnets, and Indian headdresses we made and wore? Then we'd hear the story of the FIRST THANKSGIVING again: how the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, nearly starved to death, lost half their number, and were saved when local Indians brought them food and helped show them how to raise corn, etc. Then, in 1623 the feast of Thanksgiving, with red and white enjoying the bounty.
Like a lot of simple stories, this one is both false and true. The false part is that it was not the first Thanksgiving. The original landing party on the James River in what became Virginia had a Day of Thanksgiving in 1619, beating the Pilgrims to become the first Thanksgiving. But, the true part is that it was the tradition of the Pilgrims that spread throughout New England and eventually across the northern states observed on various days. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November. (FDR moved it forward a week to give a longer Christmas shopping season.)
(more below)
Thanksgiving has been a religious day for many. The Episcopalians (the Church of England in the states became the Protestant Episcopal Church after the Revolution) in 1789 announced they would hold yearly Thanksgiving observances. In large part through them, and through their much more popular step-daughter Methodism, English harvest festival traditions and worship became part of our heritage. Of course, Anglicans did not invent harvest festivals. It is a nearly universal human practice to give thanks to the Divine for the bounty of the earth and sea.
Have a real Thanksgiving: pray. And read Scripture. This year I recommend Psalm 65, and Habbakuk 3:17-19. Happy Thanksgiving.
Like a lot of simple stories, this one is both false and true. The false part is that it was not the first Thanksgiving. The original landing party on the James River in what became Virginia had a Day of Thanksgiving in 1619, beating the Pilgrims to become the first Thanksgiving. But, the true part is that it was the tradition of the Pilgrims that spread throughout New England and eventually across the northern states observed on various days. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November. (FDR moved it forward a week to give a longer Christmas shopping season.)
(more below)
Thanksgiving has been a religious day for many. The Episcopalians (the Church of England in the states became the Protestant Episcopal Church after the Revolution) in 1789 announced they would hold yearly Thanksgiving observances. In large part through them, and through their much more popular step-daughter Methodism, English harvest festival traditions and worship became part of our heritage. Of course, Anglicans did not invent harvest festivals. It is a nearly universal human practice to give thanks to the Divine for the bounty of the earth and sea.
Have a real Thanksgiving: pray. And read Scripture. This year I recommend Psalm 65, and Habbakuk 3:17-19. Happy Thanksgiving.
Tocqueville wrote:
So Help Me, I'm Grateful
A few rustling leaves that escaped the bonfires, a few snow flurries that signal that it will soon be time to bring out the snow shovels, ice chippers, ice skates, mittens, heavy socks, all the winter gear. But not yet. Or so we hoped as children that Thanksgiving Day would be the last warm breath of autumn rather than the first blast of winter’s freeze. It was usually a bit of both, somewhere in between.
What was all that thanksgiving about? I still wonder sometimes. With the flood of catalogues and sales and pre-sales and early-bird-secret-sales, it seems the first blast of the buying season comes in with the mail. The lights were strung up from tree to tree to grace the parades, the Jingle Elf or the Winter Holiday processions. There used to be a man in a red suit until about 2025, but he was put back into the bottle, only to be released in secret, quietly in the privacy of one’s home, but not in public. Imagine it took some scholar fool working for The Sybil’s Liberty Union to claim, and somehow prove, that the name of the man in the red suit was really religious!
He didn’t seem religious to me. He had no mosque, no creed, but then again, now that I think about it, he did seem strangely mystical. He was all over the world at one and the same time. He could weigh the wish lists of millions of children and keep track of the delivery of suitable presents, all without the use of Fed Ex or UPS tracking numbers. And those elves, holed up in a year-round frigid arctic land, so he couldn’t be accused of running sweatshops? Where did they come from? Was this voluntary labor? Did they get minimum wage? Did elf children have any choice about future employment? Forced labor, probably. Now that I think of it, he probably was a religious kook.
Still, good things evolve out of the old religions, as long as they die at last. St. Nick was a gift giver, and for some reason we still enjoy gift-giving as the winter approaches. Children offer up gifts of laughter and peals of delight that remind me of the delight I felt in grandmother’s house on Thanksgiving Day when dozens of first and second cousins and aunts and uncles, great and not-so-great, brought pies and cakes and drinks and footballs and candies to celebrate together what we called our blessings. Grandma and all the others gave stories and laughter and it almost seems like yesterday. It was a giving place. I still get something of that old feeling when someone gives me a gift, which is ok, but I’ve gotten hooked on the feeling even when the gifts are put away. And that's where things start to unravel for me.
I am not sure why I still feel that way, grateful I mean. I know I am not supposed to. Many of the enlightened leaders of my young adult years proved to us beyond the shadow of their doubt that there was nothing given about life really. There are no such things as good and evil, only things that happen that we call good and things that happen that we call bad. Life just happens. This is what I remember from helping my kids with their homework, as well.
I still get this feeling, though, of gratitude, and when I get, it feels like I need to do something with it and put in the right place, some place or some one where it ought to go. I look at myself, and I think, my life feels like a gift. But to whom? To me? I am the gift to me? That doesn’t make any sense. But all the same, the feeling won’t go away. In fact, it’s getting stronger. I can’t get that red-suited man out of my head and I blame him; I hate him. But maybe it's my grandmother who did this to me. But I can't hate her, I just can't.
I need to read some of the old books about how I’m really that old bag of chemicals typing at a keyboard until I type Hamlet. How I live on a tiny blue speck of water and rock circling a medium yellow sun on the edge of average galaxy, put here by no one for nothing, by chance. It could be I have a chemical imbalance that I keep thinking I should be grateful to something.
I know I need help, for I just keep feeling more important than I should, and I feel so, well, grateful to be alive. I hope someone can tell me why and help.
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