Thanksgiving

Reality check…people are really enraged with my previous post In a couple of hours the secular holiday of Thanksgiving will start. For most it is a wonderful occasion to get together with family, friends, extended family, and future friends. It’s relatively low pressure holiday, it requires about a week or two of preparation for the hosting family and for a holiday is relatively low cost for most…some poultry, and some sides. Special efforts are made for vegans and vegetarians to have a replacement dish for the poultry. I saw some fake lemon chicken in the fridge though why they couldn’t make fake lemon turkey I don’t know.

Life changes, people change, times change and holidays do change. Chanukah was a celebration of a Hebrew battle victory. It now celebrates a fairly minor miracle of a small bottle of oil lasting 8 days…not exactly Moses parting the Red Sea. Christmas was the holiday of the birth of the Messiah.,, many still celebrate it as such.

In part the holiday of Thanksgiving celebrates the Harvest. Along with it is a story of cooperation between European settlers and Native Americans which leaves out a larger more troubling issue that occurred. The story has become a fairy tale we tell our children while…

As I tell this I realize how enraged people are with me and my previous post from Seinfeld. I’m guess the evening before Thanksgiving is a solemn day and I have the appearance of making light of it…my ignorance is vast.

I have encountered a troubling issue here which is far bigger than myself and I don’t have a solution, Earth borne issues are seldom solved from pink clouds.

As part of a greater culture we subsume the culture we exist in. Can the holiday be changed sufficiently to celebrate great tenets like the earth, the harvest, the rain and a truer lesson of mutual cooperation?

I hate to give up the holiday. My family has gotten together for years in celebration for years…but celebrating what? An ear of corn hanging on the door? It’s not like the holiday of Passover where we literally spend hours discussing every aspect of the Exodus and the representation of each crumb of Matzoh laying on the table. In all the years we celebrating Thanksgiving I can only once remember discussing the origins of the holiday…only once…but what is clear is it was a holiday of family and cheer and abundance and I again hate to give it up.

At one point in this story my host family made disclosures about themselves and without issue I agreed to make major changes in some of my external defining characteristics. Not that it would have been a deal breaker but I would have had a really hard time giving up Thanksgiving.

I think the holiday could be better managed to maintain the respect to the true events of the time, maintain integration into the greater culture and again celebrate the goodness of the earth and it’s abundance during the  harvest which is in fact a tenet of virtually all religions.

Humblest apologies to those toes I’ve step on and a greater thanks to all those who’ve patient with me.

Ed

text unchecked for errors

Answering questions

1. 1. This is not a celebration of the wholesale slaughter of millions of people. It’s a secular holiday and I don’t know anyone who has celebrated this.
   2. Is it sacrilege to at least explore this topic? My point is that whereas there is a terrible story, the holiday as it’s been sold and practiced does not reflect this.
   3. Who am I to question this? The holiday in my household and the people in my community has always been festive without negative connotation of any sort. It’s been a time of family and friends and mostly food. I believe the holiday has been portrayed to represent good things. this is the holiday we celebrated. No one celebrated death and destruction…we celebrated the fairy tale.
   4. I’m hearing people are understanding some of this…it’s just difficult to make a major change…
   5. I’m happy with open discussion
   6. What do I want? At the end of the day I truly love turkey…I love it baked fried, scrambled with eggs, mixed with the mashed potatoes and corn into a soup from that roasted chicken place that went out of business (Boston Market), i love it left overed, i love the skin fried into turkey skin bacon…and so forth. I love the family the food and the whole notion, true or not, that people could get along and share this world in abundance. We know this can be true but it is often not. Can the holiday reflect better values and a hope for the future?
   7. In all cultures good people have rescued and helped others irrespective of race, creed religion and other “values”. Animals practice these behaviors too. Could this be a better tool for learning tolerance in our society? and still maintain the honor of the true events of the time?

I was excited to see that Matthew McConaughey was already on this, getting ahead of the curve advertising turkey like he does beef…turns out it was Wild Turkey Bourbon.

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