November 25, 2021

Happy Thanksgiving Day!

Today is the day of (American) Thanksgiving, the fourth Thursday in November. Days of thanksgiving aren’t uncommon in history. The English celebrated the victory over the Spanish Armada and the foiling of Guy Fawkes’ gunpowder plots with days of thanksgiving. In America, New England and Virginia colonists originally celebrated days of thanksgiving, thanking God for blessings such as harvests, ship landings, military victories, or the end of a drought. The event that Americans commonly call the "First Thanksgiving" was celebrated by the Pilgrims after their first harvest in the New World in 1621. This feast lasted three days and was attended by 90 Wampanoag Native American people and 53 Pilgrims (survivors of the Mayflower).

Americans have been celebrating Thanksgiving for nearly four centuries, commemorating that solemn dinner in November, 1621. We know the story well, or think we do. Adorned in funny hats, large belt buckles, and clunky black shoes, the Pilgrims of Plymouth gave thanks to God for his blessings, demonstrated by the survival of their fragile settlement. The local Indians, supporting characters who generously pulled the Pilgrims through the first winter and taught them how to plant corn, joined the feast with gifts of venison. A good time was had by all, before things quietly took their natural course: the American colonies expanded, the Indians gave up their lands and faded from history, and the germ of collective governance found in the Mayflower Compact blossomed into American democracy. The problem with this story is that almost none of it is true.

It is easy though to see why and how the Thanksgiving tradition came to be entrenched in America the way it did. Fretting over immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century, American mythmakers discovered that the Pilgrims, and New England as a whole, were perfectly cast as national founders: white, Protestant, democratic, and blessed with an American character centered on family, work, individualism, freedom, and faith.

So how does one take on a myth? How does one confront an ideology that has long metastasized into popular history? These are exercises that are harder on our souls than on our bodies and minds. They are harder on the living than they are on the dead. They question our beloved creation stories that uphold traditional social orders. They make our heroes less heroic. They ask us to consider the villains as full and nuanced human beings. Nonetheless, we have an obligation to try. “This land is your land. This land is my land. This land where my fathers died. Land of the Pilgrim Pride.” It makes no sense, these days, to ask ethnically diverse students to sing these anthems that celebrate these mythic dudes with their odd hats and big buckles. At the very least, could we include Indians among “my fathers”? Could we pay better attention to the ways they died? Could we acknowledge that Indians are not ghosts in the landscape or foils in a delusional nationalist dream, but actual living and sentient people?

And then there are these bigger questions. How can we be more joyful? What makes us happy? As we age, the clues seem to appear a little brighter. The purpose of living is to change ourselves for the better. The Indian mystics of yore even offered that change is the ONLY purpose of living. To realize the nature of one’s own self as divine. No matter who we are - black or white, young or old, man or woman - we are all striving to become better versions of ourselves. We are striving to make better versions of the worlds we inhabit. In this process, we create all kinds of happiness. There is happiness that comes from simply wanting to do better. There is happiness in actually doing better. The dance recital or the first soccer game may seem trivial but these milestones mark our progress in life. They remind us that we are on the path, trying to do better. And there is the happiness from having become better. This is the best of all. Here, we come to be at peace with the things that disappointed and enraged us in our youth. Here, we come to realize that even as we change things - be it ourselves, or our families, or institutions, or nations - we must take care to not dislike those very things we are trying to change. That we have to find a way to celebrate change and progress even as we mourn the fallen.

Thanksgiving is a day of mourning for some. It’s a day of giving thanks for others. It’s a day to celebrate family, football and tradition. Thanksgiving is so many things. It is filled with all the contradictions that life itself is made up of. Abe Lincoln proposed that God ordained this holiday. In his writings, he said, “While gratitude based on temporal things will eventually fail us, Thanksgiving is an act of communion with eternal God. As such, it anchors us to something that will last forever.” Hmm…there’s something in what Abe said.

Happy Thanksgiving!