Thanksgiving Rethought

Almost everything I learned in school about Thanksgiving was wrong. Or at best incomplete, or skewed to endorse colonialism and diminish the history of the native community. In all fairness to my schools, I took the bare minimum of required history classes and perhaps I’m not remembering all that I was taught. Still, an honest and historically accurate basic understanding of pre- colonial and colonial US history should be available through the required courses. It’s been a long time since I attended school so hopefully things have improved.

As I got older and my interests expanded, I began reading colonial and pre-colonial history. This is not the place and I am not the person to write about that. If you haven’t studied it, even informally, I would encourage you to start. ¹

One thing that emerged from my reading, was a sense of discomfort around the received tradition of Thanksgiving. ² I began to understand why native people find our US Thanksgiving and Columbus Day celebrations very problematic.³ And yet, the idea of a day of Thanksgiving, untethered from history and mythology, is a worthy idea. Taking time to recognize the things we have to be thankful for, both large and small is good for us to do. Thankfulness and gratitude are important for spiritual and emotional health.

Thanksgiving has changed from a low key one day holiday to so much more. It is now the kick off to holiday shopping. Complicated recipes and menus abound. Sporting events and parades compete for our attention. And family gatherings, well they can be complicated at the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

So what can we do? Can we salvage something good out of Thanksgiving day? If so, what would that be?

I don’t want to tell you what to do or give you more things to do. I offer what follows as suggestions that I have found helpful. Feel free to ignore all of this. Seriously. As my understanding, learning, and life change, these may also change for me.

• Learning. Keep learning our history and this includes intentionally seeking out and reading BIPOC authors.

• Reflect. Spend time thinking about what I have learned.

• Food. A simple meal. Unless people are trying to be fancy, “traditional’ thanksgiving foods can be pretty simple. I think there is value in families or groups having their traditional meal of family favorites, maybe it’s turkey, maybe it’s something else that is meaningful⁴.

• Connection. You may want to share your meal with people who live nearby who are important to you, family or friends. If they are not close, can you reach out another way? If you have a wonderful family, you are fortunate. Not all of us do.The practice of “friendsgiving” or having chosen family/family of choice to share the day with is a good thing. As Christians, we have a precedent for this. Jesus up ends the concept of the traditional family. He spends a lot of time eating with friends. If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for us. And maybe don’t make Thanksgiving a multi hour long endurance fest. Perhaps, gather, have pie, be grateful, go home.

• Thankfulness. Gratitude, and thankfulness are basic spiritual practices that transcend religious belief or non-belief. Taking a day to be grateful is good for us. Better still, the regular practice of gratitude is good for us.

• Resistance. It takes some effort to resist the pressure around shopping and sports and holiday competitive cooking, the pressure for everything and everyone to be perfect- all “the doing” that our culture imposes on holidays. Is there something you would like to let go of?

What would make your Thanksgiving meaningful? If you are one of those people who love everything about Thanksgiving, the big family gathering, the feast, the parades, the football, go for it. Have a wonderful time! If some of these things stress you or your family out, could you change it?

I wonder, what would a “do what helps you be thankful – whatever that is” holiday look like for you?

1. Here is one book I found helpful.
   This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving: Religion and Race in American History ↩︎
2. Here are a few resources to get you started:
   Thanksgiving history https://www.si.edu/spotlight/thanksgiving/history
   Thanksgiving wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_(United_States)
   thanksgiving critique https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/dining/thanksgiving-native-americans.html
   thanksgiving myths https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/us/thanksgiving-myths-fact-check.html ↩︎
3. National day of mourning
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Day_of_Mourning_(United_States_protest)
   The History of Thanksgiving from the Native American Perspective, https://blog.nativehope.org/what-does-thanksgiving-mean-to-native-americans ↩︎
4. Thanksgiving food
   https://www.si.edu/spotlight/thanksgiving/thanksgiving-foods#:~:text=According%20to%20Bruce%20Smith%2C%20senior,the%20country%2C%E2%80%9D%20he%20said. ↩︎