DUKES
FANS:
THE INCREDIBLE DISAPPEARING THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY
I love Thanksgiving. It has long been one of my favorite holidays stretching back to when I was a little kid. It was a holiday I loved probably even more than Christmas. There ware a couple of reasons for this: as a kid Thanksgiving meant time off from school; although I liked school, a two-day holiday in the middle of the week was great. Thanksgiving also meant gathering together and eating lots of great food. And everyone was involved in getting the meal ready and setting the table. Often you were with people who were normally at your dinner table, and that could make for fun and/or interesting arguments. And most notably, on Thanksgiving you did not nave to buy gifts. It wasn’t required or expected. So Thanksgiving had all of the wonders of a big deal holiday and few of the drawbacks. I loved it. And as I grew older this idea of everyone pausing their regular lives and gathering together to express some sort of “gratitude” came to mean more and more to me. Thanksgiving gradually became an important way for me to look at the world and my role in it.
Recently it seems as if Thanksgiving is
having a hard time of it in our culture, at least in our most visible media and
popular culture. Over the last few years I have seen it become well nigh
invisible in commercials, TV references, and even on the little bits of social
media I observe. Each year it seems we have Halloween and then jump over
Thanksgiving to get to the December holidays, and more importantly, buying
things. Christmas sales and specials started appearing this year BEFORE
Halloween. Black Friday sales have gotten tons of mentions already, but the day
before Black Friday-the day we supposedly express our sincere gratitude for all
that we have-hardly draws a mention anymore. I guess there is not a lot of
money to be made on it in comparison to the winter holidays; restaurants, grocery
stores and bakeries remind you to get your orders in on time, but that is about
it. To the culture at large it doesn’t mean as much as it once did. While we
definitely still recognize it, our culture doesn’t spend much public (and
billable) time talking about it anymore. That saddens me, and not just because
it is one of my favorite holidays.
It saddens me because downplaying this day
seems to me to be downplaying some part of our basic humanity. Thanksgiving is
one of the most uniquely human occurrences in our lives; it is one of those
holidays that may well mark us as a different type of life form on this earth.
As far as we know, dogs, protozoa, trees, beetles and other living tings do not
develop long lasting group rituals to express this thing we call, “gratitude.”
Humans do. And we have been doing it all over the planet and at all different
times and in tons of different ways forever. Expressing thanks is one of the
most universal of things we humans do, and it is something that people from all
faith traditions, and even from no faith traditions at all, do and have done
virtually forever. It has been observed by every culture, by every ethnic
group, in every time period, and just about everywhere on the planet. It is an
important part of what makes us “us.”
This idea of expressing gratitude is
something humans have done since prehistory. The return of wild herbs and
plants for the pre-agricultural migrating societies; the running of the fish
again in the rivers and streams; the return of birds and eggs and animals to trap
and to hunt; the seasonal changes in weather and climate; all of these would
have been things our hunting and gathering ancestors hoped and prayed for, and
they would have found ways to give “thanks” for them when they occurred. There was
a definite perceived link between what humans did and whether of not these
resources returned, so group rituals were developed to try to give humans a
better chance of influencing the odds. Then when agriculture developed, this
process reached new levels of intensity. Yes, agriculture meant humans could
stay in one place, but that stability of place required humans to do a hell of
a lot of hard work. Gathering and planting of seeds, building shelter,
defending territory, watering and nurturing the crops, fighting the weather,
harvesting crops-these and more factors of agricultural life were all things
that demanded a huge amount of labor, a lot of working together, and plenty of luck
or divine help. And things still might not work. So the rituals of giving
thanks became an important and necessary part of spring planting and fall harvest
festivals all over the world and still are. Although in our modern civilized
world many of us are far removed from the actual work that goes into sustaining
a civilization, our societies today are still resting on and dependent upon that
same infrastructure. No, it doesn’t take as many people to do it, and much of
the work can seem invisible. But if we look closely we see that it is still
there and still necessary. And as we all know when a traffic light is out or
our stove breaks or our computer acts up, even with all of this technological “advancement”
we still need luck and maybe some divine help.
So I want to take time to acknowledge that
simple act of expressing gratitude-of acknowledging that we all need other
people and more than just ourselves to make our way through this world and this
life. We need others’ help and assistance. And every now and then we have to
formally acknowledge that. The human in us needs to stop and say, “Thanks” to
some spirit or some ones or some things outside of and/or beyond ourselves. Otherwise
we may misread our place in the world and think we did all of this by ourselves. So in addition to the great food and the family
reunions and the football games and the parades, I hope you have a happy,
thoughtful, and grateful Thanksgiving. And if you can, please find a way to
help some people who are a little less fortunate than you are.
A COUPLE OF PLACES TO GIVE
FOR THANKSGIVING DONATIONS:
Philabudance: http://www.philabundance.org/
Chester County Food Bank: http://chestercountyfoodbank.org/
Mercer Street Friends Food Bank: http://www.mercerstreetfriends.org/
Food Bank of Delaware: http://www.fbd.org/
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