Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I think it's the only good one we've got left, primarily because it can't effectively commercialized. It's also a holiday devoted to something I consider to be a virtue -- gratitude.
Among other things, it's a time to take a moment to enjoy and reflect on what you have. Eat a good meal, spend some time with friends and family, take a nap. It's like the antidote for the worst ills of modernity. Everybody just calm down for second.
Christmas comes with huge expectations. It can be ruined in so many ways. It makes people stressed and broke. In the broader culture, it's only loosely connected with the birth of Christ anymore. And even that is only because the Roman Emperor Constantine decided not only that Christianity was going to be the state religion of Rome, but that it would also take over the traditional Roman and Pagan festivals held near the winter solstice.
New Year's is another nightmare of a holiday. Get drunk, make resolutions that you won't even manage to keep until the 16th of January and if you don't have someone to kiss at midnight, you just get to feel like more of a lonely failure.
All these expectations. So many of these holiday conventions have just become an assault on our psychological and financial well-being.
But not Thanksgiving. Nah man. It's a couch of a holiday. Sit down, relax. It's the slacker holiday. Even if you ruin it, it's only Thanksgiving. Nobody has a weepy story about how Thanksgiving was ruined. And even the stories of Thanksgiving disaster all seem to have an element of comedy about them.
But ruin Christmas... yeesh. Even worse, the mere fear that you might ruin Christmas, ruins Christmases.
So Thanksgiving manages to be sacred without being serious. Because however threadbare the mythology of the 'first' Thanksgiving might be wearing for you, you can't get around the fact that it's a holiday predicated on the idea of being grateful.
I have in mind a longer essay about the virtue of Gratitude -- how it works to dispel envy. Allows you to appreciate and enjoy what you have, but this is not that essay. So I will leave you with a Poem by Carl Sandberg, which I read every year at Thanksgiving. It's called
Fire Dreams
(Written to be read aloud, if so be, Thanksgiving Day)
I REMEMBER here by the fire,
In the flickering reds and saffrons,
They came in a ramshackle tub,
Pilgrims in tall hats,
Pilgrims of iron jaws,
Drifting by weeks on beaten seas,
And the random chapters say
They were glad and sang to God.
And so
Since the iron-jawed men sat down
And said, “Thanks, O God,”
For life and soup and a little less
Than a hobo handout to-day,
Since gray winds blew gray patterns of sleet on Plymouth Rock,
Since the iron-jawed men sang “Thanks, O God,”
You and I, O Child of the West,
Remember more than ever
November and the hunter’s moon,
November and the yellow-spotted hills
And so
In the name of the iron-jawed men
I will stand up and say yes till the finish is come and gone.
God of all broken hearts, empty hands, sleeping soldiers,
God of all star-flung beaches of night sky,
I and my love-child stand up together to-day and sing: “Thanks, O God.”
Happy Thanksgiving.
To be listened to on Thanksgiving