New York Diary

Turkey Day

I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday. I think that's because it's such a communal event. In a place with no state religion (a good thing, by all means), we don't have the equivalent of the national religious holiday the way Indonesia has Ramadan, Athens had the Dionysia, or Britain used to have Christmas. Most of our civic holidays are undercelebrated, too: we've still got the Fourth of July, to be sure, but Veterans' Day, Labor Day, and Memorial Day are no more likely to be celebrated than not to be, and anyhow, we all celebrate those days in different ways. There is no standard, shared celebration. As a nation, we might all get the day off of work (or not, given the way the service industry works these days), but we're not particularly likely to spend that day doing the same thing (much less doing it together!).

Not like Thanksgiving! Sure, we might do different things, but there is a norm from which we will be deviating: turkeys and stuffing, football and feasting. And while there are strong religious overtones to literal thanks-giving, and strong Anglo cultural overtones when we eat meat and potatoes and gravy, fundamentally this is an inclusive and not an exclusive holiday. It is reasonable to presume that one's neighbors are celebrating--and, if they're not, obviously one should invite them over to join in the feast. There can be no offense taken: it's their holiday as much as our own. We all get to share in this day's celebration.

There are exceptions, I suppose. When I was little, we put on plays about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and religious freedom from the mean old English. Subsequent years have seen the reinterpretation of the whole Pilgrim thing, of course; a cynical reading of the first Thanksgiving says that it was just the beginning of the end for the Native Americans on this continent, and that the pilgrims were themselves Puritanical crazy-crazies who refused even to celebrate Christmas because it would be, you know, too much fun (and we can't be having any fun around here). The great thing about Thanksgiving Day, though, is that we can grant the truth in these more cynical claims, and we still get to celebrate the day. That's because, fundamentally, Thanksgiving is not primarily about remembering the past but rather about celebrating the present with friends and loved ones at one's side.

That's quite an interesting phenomenon. Other holidays are explicitly memorializing, and this comes back to haunt us when Revisionist historians get their hands on them (or even just, when time passes). Christmas, Easter, Sukkot, Passover: these are religious holidays by which we remember particular events. Independence Day and Veterans' Day: these are national holidays by which we do the same. The importance of each of these wanes and waxes in popular imagination as the importance of their underlying events shrink or grow. As we reinterpret the past, we lose sight of the celebrations; Easter becomes a less salient holiday as the life (or divinity) of Christ becomes a less important piece of our social and cultural fabric, and especially as we become less willing to believe in the literal ascension which is celebrated on this day. Veterans' Day suffers simply from a removal in time: there remain a huge number of veterans of foreign wars, to be sure, but the significance of the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" is quickly disappearing along with all of our World War I veterans. The day is not necessarily doomed to oblivion; we could redefine it in the same way that we've redefined Independence Day to be as much about hot dogs and fireworks and our present nationalism as about the Revolutionary War or the way we ass-whupped the British (who, I hasten to add, are our very good friends these days). But Thanksgiving is a special case, I think, precisely because it doesn't commemorate a particular event, and it never really has. Nobody celebrates Thanksgiving to remember the first Thanksgiving (though obviously the one evokes the other). The celebration has, from the beginning, been about togetherness, a shared meal, and, indeed, a sense of thanks for what we've got. It is and always was about the present. And it is great.

posted by Skay @ 3:39 AM