Thanksgiving and America

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

Ever noticed how the word "Thanksgiving" has the same kind of "so simple that anyone with a 2nd grade education could understand this" quality as the term "Homeland Security"? Heh, in any event...

Thanksgiving is probably the only truly American holiday. July 4th comes close, but then again, lots of nations celebrate an independence Day. We have other oddities such as Memorial Day and Labor Day, and perhaps Presidents Day, but these are more like simple excuses to have a day off rather than things we celebrate. On Thanksgiving, though, nearly everyone drops everything and spends time with family, and most likely has a meal that uses some variation on the turkey-cranberry sauce-stuffing paradigm. It's a much bigger deal than your average excuse to sleep late day.

Thanksgiving is oddly reflective of our nation's quasi-secular/quasi-religious nature. Here we have a holiday where one is presumably giving thanks to a certain "God", and yet unlike most religious holidays the traditional idea of a Thanksgiving revolves more around turkey and stuffing than spending time in a place of worship.

Thanksgiving is also representative of our nation's various obsessions with the oddest events. Here we are essentially celebrating how a bunch of nutty religious dissidents got thrown out of England, were afraid of the cultural freedom of the Dutch, and made the hilarious unwise decision to shake the bees nest of fate by setting up a colony in America without having a clue how to survive. Following the deaths of most of the colonists, the following autumn they decided to celebrate the fact that some natives had shown them how to go another winter without finishing the starving to death business. This cooperation between two cultures is supposed to be inspiring or something, even though we know the rest of the story where the successors of these religious dissidents go on to generally kill or otherwise oppress most of the natives on the continent.

It may come off like I'm somehow demeaning Thanksgiving, but I'm not. Generally, the older a holiday is, the more bat-shit insane the story behind it becomes (Random Thought: Ever notice how in a lot of Natvity scenes, the newborn baby Jesus is the size of a two year-old?). Holidays, in a sense, are not about the reason the holiday exists. The usefulness of using holidays to preserve the memory of the past probably started to dwindle when the printing press was invented in the West. Today, what holidays are really about lies in how the people of the present day celebrate that holiday. The memory of Saint Patrick is in very few people's mind on St. Patrick's Day and only the barest few people here in the U.S. know anything about Cinco de Mayo beyond the fact that the number 5 and the month of May are involved. These holidays are really socially condoned occasions to get smashed. With New Year's Eve we've taken this idea to it's logical conclusion and we celebrate the occasion of an accumulator register adding a one..."year++...Let's party!!!"

Thus, what's comforting to me about Thanksgiving and reassuring to me of the condition of our society is how it's still a holliday genuinely devoted to family and togetherness (unlike Christmas which has become genuinely devoted to getting free stuff). This is family values in it's true form, not the "people smiling too much who hate gays" form. This is a holiday that reflects the place of love in our society and also that despite some appearences, we truly appreciate what we have. We have New Year's to celebrate life. We have Independence Day to celebrate liberty. On Thanksgiving, we celebrate the pursuit of happiness.