Thankful for Thanksgiving

Well, it’s the weekend after Thanksgiving (here in the US at least), and that’s typically a time for me to blow off blog posts.  If you’re lucky, you may get one of my infamous abbreviated posts, such I did in 2014, and in 2015, and in 2016.^*  But this year, the weekend is falling squarely on a “full post week,” according to my new blog schedule, so I have less of an excuse than usual.

If you actually read any of those abbreviated posts I just threw you links to, you will have picked up some of our Thanksgiving traditions: enjoying the sides more than the turkey, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, and coming up with 3 things (each) that we’re thankful for and sharing them with each other.  Other than that, we don’t do a whole lot on Thanksgiving.  In particular, we do not travel for it, and we very rarely have anyone over for it.  Our lovely family (for those keeping score at home, current count is: 5 humans, 2 canines, 2 felines, 1 rodent, and a tank full of piscines, arthropods, gastropods, and an amphibian who still refuses to die) is quite large enough, thank-you-very-much, and just managing to get all of us to the table, with the food, enough clothes on everyone that some pictures can be taken, while also trying not to kill each other because cooking large holiday meals is stressful enough without even considering that our kitchen is basically the size of a sardine tin ... just managing all that is challenging enough as it is.  Hell, even getting the dining room table completely cleared off (which we pretty much do exactly twice a year) is a chore.  If we had to add to that the extra work of cleaning house enough to be presentable to friends and relatives, and the extra food it would require, and so on and so forth, I don’t think we’d survive.

But, as it is, it’s pretty much exactly the right amount of work and it pays off very nicely.  The 5 of us humans share pretty much the same feelings on politics and religion, and, if any of the fuzzy children are pro-Trump or anything along those lines, they at least keep it to themselves.  None of us are huge drinkers—I think my single glass of wine was the only alcohol consumed throughout the entire meal—so there’s no drunken ranting either.  So we don’t have the stereotypical issues that you hear office mates and late-night comedians go on about.  The smallies will occasionally fight over the last buttered roll, and The Mother may yell at the eldest for sneaking food under the table to the dogs, and maybe we quibble over who took much of that and they’ll never eat it all and why didn’t you pass the so-and-so to me, I mean you had it right there in your hand and you knew I wanted some ... and that’s about as contentious as it ever gets.  Which is, you know ... nice.

This year, the lists of things we were thankful for were dominated by having a heart surgery survivor in our midst, as might be expected.  I was also bold enough to be thankful for MST3K for the second year (not in a row), since we actually got the premiere of a brand new season for our Turkey Day marathon: six movies designed to be watched in one marathon sitting.  Sure, we only made it through three of them, but it was pretty glorious nonetheless.  And we were thankful for each other, and for our friends, and for the fact that none of us or our friends had their houses burned down or suffered so much smoke damage as to be unlivable, and for my excellent job that pays me very well and yet that I still enjoy going to work every day even after five years, all of which is a long-winded way to say, we’re thankful for our life.  It’s a nice life, and we quite enjoy it, and, in general, we’re not just living it.  We’re experiencing it, and relishing it, and thriving because of it.  And it’s good to appreciate that.  And I think that’s what Thanksgiving should be about.

Thanksgiving gets a lot of shit these days.  It has a serious image problem: many people like to trot out Thanksgiving as a way to whitewash the relationship between us white Europeans and the Native Americans.  But, you know, Thanksgiving didn’t actually start with that whole Pilgrims-and-Indians feast.  Wikipedia tells us that:

Before 1536 there were 95 Church holidays, plus 52 Sundays, when people were required to attend church and forego work and sometimes pay for expensive celebrations.  The 1536 reforms reduced the number of Church holidays to 27, but some Puritans wished to completely eliminate all Church holidays, including Christmas and Easter.  The holidays were to be replaced by specially called Days of Fasting or Days of Thanksgiving, in response to events that the Puritans viewed as acts of special providence.  Unexpected disasters or threats of judgement from on high called for Days of Fasting.  Special blessings, viewed as coming from God, called for Days of Thanksgiving.

Of course, we don’t talk about that, because Thanksgiving is supposed to be a secular holiday: something we can all enjoy regardless of our religious affiliations.  But of course even in its religious roots, it has a bit of anti-establishment in its history—the whole concept of days of thanksgiving was to replace the froufrou high Church holidays.  But even so it was still a Christian celebration; who you were supposed to be giving thanks to was never really in question.  Recasting it as a coming together of disparate cultures—regardless of how accurate or how fictional—seems to me like a desperate attempt to secularize the holiday (because of course the Native Americans wouldn’t have been giving thanks to the Christian God).  But I’m not sure that’s really necessary.  If you’re religiously inclined (and I don’t really think it matters what type of religion), you know who you’re giving thanks to.  And, supposing you’re not, who would you be giving thanks to anyway?  Now, me, I’m more inclined toward the agnostic, so I’m perfectly happy to throw some thanks out into the greater universe without particularly needing to know if there’s anyone on the receiving end.  But I’m at a loss to explain how a proper atheist can celebrate Thanksgiving: if everything happens according to random chance, there certainly doesn’t seem to be any point in thanking anyone for it.  But we seem to have all agreed that we can be thankful once a year without requiring deity, destiny, or doctrine, and I think we can continue that trend without needing to drag the Native Americans into it.

So I don’t need any Pilgrims^** to celebrate Thanksgiving, and I don’t need any attempts to rewrite history to pretend that our ancestors got along better than they actually did.  I personally think Thanksgiving is more about what’s happening right now.  It’s a chance to set all the bad stuff aside—and, let’s face it, there’s always going to be some bad stuff.  But on Thanksgiving, you ignore all that—you focus on the good stuff, and you get to say, hey, maybe my life is pretty damned good after all.  I think that’s the value of listing things to be thankful for: it reminds us that there really are a lot of things to put on that list.  And some of them are little things, and some of them are big things, but they all count.  They all contribute to that feeling that life is pretty sweet after all.  And so we get together with our family, and perhaps a few friends, and we celebrate that with some good food and maybe a beer or a glass of wine or a fine single-malt whiskey, and we eat too much and we drink too much and we watch too much television, and then we fall asleep on the couch, because, hey: life is good.

And I’m happy to be reminded of that, once a year at least.  Honestly, we should probably have Thanksgiving more often.  We’d probably be happier if we did.

Although we’d probably get sick of the turkey leftovers eventually.

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* Last year you didn’t even get one of those.  I plead heart surgery.

** And, anyway, as a native Virginian, I’m educated to believe that those Massachusetts Johnny-come-latelies are hogging all the glory despite the fact that we did everything first.