Thanksgiving is an astonishingly traditional holiday. In a world where everything seems to be changing, Thanksgiving feels almost unchanged from my own childhood to the present. Turkey and pumpkin pie are still the main event, the cornucopia the standard decoration. We stream the classic movies and songs instead of checking the TV Guide, but they’re the same movies and songs. Turkey Trots have been held across America for decades, enabling exercise addicts to get their endorphin fix before the rest of the world even wakes up at a massive downtown party. They’re bigger than ever nowadays, and still plenty of fun. (Yes, I am One of Those People. And quite likely my fellow addicts will be the first to read this article, so have a great race, friends!)
There may be a few small novelties. Sometimes people get a little crazy and try cooking their turkey in some new way (Sous vide! Smoker! Deep fryer!). Gratitude Journals are more of a thing now, at least in my little world of religiously conservative women, though I don’t personally keep one. For the unfamiliar: you record one thing you’re grateful for on each day in November. I’m told one is simply supposed to write “the first thing that pops into your head.” Though I fully support others’ efforts to chronicle their gratitude, I can’t get past the “overthinking” problem. One day I’m writing “Jesus” and the next “coffee” and that just feels wrong. So no journaling for me, but I do try to make November into a seasonal occasion for reflecting on the theme of gratitude.
Perhaps that sounds treacly, but I think it’s a worthwhile endeavor. I normally put the point like this. The modern world is constantly finding ways to make us feel small, but in a mean, resentful, and grasping way. Gratitude makes us feel small in a good way. And that in turn helps us to be “bigger” people, in the most important ways. It seems especially fitting that our season of gratitude falls in November, an unassuming month when the world is mostly brown, the weather chilly, and the school year trundling along with no end in sight. It’s aggressively ordinary, just everyday life uncut. That can be dreary. But with gratitude on the brain, we may find ourselves noticing that everyday life can also be quite wonderful at times, and surprisingly strange.
Indeed, if we can bring ourselves to look at old traditions with fresh eyes, we may reflect that Thanksgiving is in some ways quite an odd holiday. It’s about gratitude, American history, and turkeys. Would those data points make any sense to us, if we hadn’t grown up tracing our hands on paper plates and preparing yam dishes in celebration of unsmiling Puritans?
Thanksgiving has a story, of course, which can help to connect the dots. But it’s an odd story. Religious zealots come to an untrammeled North America seeking their “city on a hill,” and nearly starve to death in their fresh-off-the-boat incompetence, only to be rescued by magnanimous pagans who happen to live nearby. In my own childhood at least, the pilgrims were always presented positively by our elders as “people who wanted to worship God in their own way,” making Thanksgiving into a celebration of both devotion and religious freedom. Because the First Thanksgiving has normally been told as a kind of national origin story, it’s reasonable to see pilgrims as the presumptive protagonists whose determination and sacrifice have been honored over the years. Their coming was a watershed event. And their deep religious conviction can reasonably be viewed as seminal for America’s identity as a Christian nation.
It’s not quite that straightforward, though. The most magnanimous-looking character in the Thanksgiving story was not European. Tisquantum, better known today as “Squanto,” was native-born, had an unclear relationship to Christianity, and almost certainly wasn’t looking to build any cities on hills. Respectful pluralism is therefore another recognizable element of the Thanksgiving story. Finally, we might note that the white people were the immigrants in this case, and we celebrate them in that role. (I have memories of pretending to be seasick in a grade school pageant as we recounted the pilgrims’ difficult journey to the New World. We definitely weren’t running from that component of the story.)
Whatever else we think of that rose-tinted historical revisionism, the decision to celebrate the benevolence of Squanto and the Wampanoag doesn’t exactly project Western arrogance and determination to dominate.
The First Thanksgiving story is not a lament for colonialist oppression, but neither is it Christian Nationalist triumphalism. If the story has a core, it’s “finding ways to live together and appreciate one another despite deep differences.” And that’s not just modern progressive gobbledygook. Although Thanksgiving was in a sense “based on a true story,” it was famously promulgated by Abraham Lincoln, who was hoping to recover some sense of unity and common purpose in a nation deeply fractured by war. The value of friendship, harmony, and cooperation are very intentional themes.
Sometimes the storybook unfolding of those themes can be quite irksome to detractors, perhaps especially cynical anti-colonialists, who point out that Tisquantum was a tribeless vagabond and former slave whose chosen name meant “Wrath of God,” and that relations between Puritans and Wampanoag (the primary participating tribe) were actually quite fraught. The feast in question may have represented a fortuitous-but-fleeting moment in that relationship, not a defining or history-changing event. By some accounts, the Wampanoag were not even invited to that first harvest feast. They heard the pilgrims firing off a celebratory salute, misunderstood the purpose, and came ready for a fight. Realizing on their arrival that it was really more of a party, they slipped away and came back with their own contribution of venison, preserving the tense-but-still-peaceful relations they had established with the Europeans. Perhaps the meal was more a diplomatic salvage mission than a celebration of deep human bonds.
What if it was, though? Thanksgiving is unquestionably a celebration, not only of a historical event, but of a tradition and story that were intentionally woven into American lore for civic purposes. But isn’t that always an element of culture? Whatever else we think of that rose-tinted historical revisionism, the decision to celebrate the benevolence of Squanto and the Wampanoag (in the mid-nineteenth century, no less!) doesn’t exactly project Western arrogance and determination to dominate. Rather, Lincoln was inviting Americans to reflect on how much we all owe to the sacrifice and generosity of others. The pilgrims were indebted to Squanto and the Wampanoag. We in turn owe much to the pilgrims, to other illustrious forbears, and (Lincoln would happily say) to the God who created us all.
If we take the world as we find it, we often find that it’s quite strange. The storylines rarely run along the courses that we’ve plotted for ourselves. Projects that we begin with the highest confidence often spiral towards disaster. Then, sometimes, they may unexpectedly be salvaged, even by people we formerly regarded as enemies or barbarians. Neither people, nor things, nor the courses of human events follow expected pathways, and yet somehow, if we’re honest with ourselves, we usually have enough and probably better than we deserve. Be grateful.
Americans aren’t exactly exuding gratitude nowadays. Our public square is ablaze with resentment and angst; nearly everyone seems dissatisfied with the straw they’ve drawn in life. And sure, people have problems. Sometimes those merit attention. But if we pull our lens back a bit, considering our general situation in either historical or global context, can we really persuade ourselves that modern-day Americans have things particularly rough? Sure, the pilgrims could give thanks, but they only had to worry about starvation, bitter winters, native tribes less friendly than the Wampanoag, crops they didn’t know how to grow, animals they didn’t know how to hunt, impatient creditors in London wanting their ROI, and plagues that killed about half the colony in the first year alone. They had so much religious freedom! And very affordable housing!
What if we spent eleven months of the year working out solutions to present problems, and one month reflecting gratefully on what we already have? Is that just too Pollyannaish? The head-in-the-sand suggestion of a complacent post-colonialist? Even if it is, take a second to consider. Our political world would undoubtedly be healthier if we think a little less about what we want, and a little more about what we value, appreciate, and wish to preserve.
What do I most want to preserve in this world? I think about it as I run along the paths of my Minnesota neighborhood (preparing to trot), passing a surprising number of turkeys along the way, especially in the fall. They’re funny-looking things, really, neither handsome nor majestic, and certainly not fast. What an odd totem for gratitude.
Reality is odd, however. It regularly defies our expectations. Would we want it any other way? If Americans could recapture that delight in the world’s strangeness, the clean feeling of being properly small, then perhaps we would remember what it means to be a great nation.