Thanksgiving

This Thursday in America is a big national holiday, Thanksgiving Day.

Like many of my fellow citizens I will do three very Thanksgiving Day type things:  travel, eat a big meal with family, and feel thankful. 

I’m thankful that I have a child who’s inviting me to have Thanksgiving at her house for the first time.  That my father is still alive and able to travel with us.  Thankful to have the money and time to travel there by train, the money to buy special foods that come with family memories, like creamed onion and mincemeat pie, and a warm place to prepare them.  Grateful for the health to be able to look back over 60 years of Thanksgiving memories and meals.  And say thank you. 

KmartMany Americans have much much less of the above blessings, if any.  Our economy is beginning to recover, but still one in seven Americans gets government assistance for food.  Wages are stagnant and the income gap widening.  Many stores, desperate or greedy, are opening earlier and earlier on the busy Thanksgiving shopping weekend.  Which means many Americans will have to work this holiday weekend.  Kmart is opening at 6AM Thursday morning and staying open 52 hours straight to maximize profits. I am grateful I don’t have to work on Thanksgiving.   I can chose the time and place of my meal with my family.

Like some Americans, I will go to a special Interfaith Thanksgiving worship service this week.  Thanksgiving is a pretty secular holiday, inspired by our history, rather than just one religion.  We do get a little sappy and amnesiac about our foundation myth on this day.  We still make our kids dress up like Pilgrims and Indians for school plays and act as if the history of whites and native people isn’t so tragic.

Challah BreadBut we can occasionally remember what we really do share as Americans and be thankful for that.  I remember helping to organize an interfaith Thanksgiving service with the Catholic and Jewish congregations in the town where I was a Protestant parish minister.  We concluded with a remarkable Thanksgiving meal.  Not in the social hall, but at the altar.  The Jewish congregation baked a huge challah thanksgiving loaf which covered the altar.  We sang “Come Ye Thankful People Come.”   We took an offering for the food bank and collected bags and bags of food.  And then we invited everyone up in a circle around the altar and we shared the challah bread, feeding each other.  The Catholic priest got a little nervous that we were sharing communion across sectarian divides.  The Benedictine monk from the school was glad his students were having a teachable moment.  I was just grateful we were together and feeding each other.

I’ve quoted before my favorite local columnist Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle.  He wrote a Thanksgiving Day column some years ago that was so popular the paper reprints it each year with just a few updates on who and what to be thankful for this year.  A couple of my favorite sections:

Thanksgiving provides a formal context in which to consider the instances of kindness that have enlightened our lives, for moments of grace that have gotten us through when all seemed lost. These are fine and sentimental subjects for contemplation….

And the teachers, the men and women who took the time to fire a passion for the abstract, to give us each a visceral sense of the continuity of history and the adventure of the future. Our society seems determined to denigrate its teachers -- at its peril, and at ours. This is their day as well.

Even closer. Companions. We all learned about good sex from somebody, and that person deserves a moment. Somebody taught us some hard lesson of life, told us something for our own good, and that willingness to risk conflict for friendship is worth a pause this day. And somebody sat with us through one long night, and listened to our crazy talk and turned it toward sanity; that person has earned this moment too.

And a moment for old friends now estranged, victims of the flux of alliances and changing perceptions. There was something there once, and that something is worth honoring as well….

And thanks, too, for all the past Thanksgivings, and for all the people we shared them with. Thanks for the time the turkey fell on the floor during the carving process; for the time Uncle Benny was persuaded to sing "Peg o' My Heart"; for the time two strangers fell in love, and two lovers fell asleep, in front of the fire, even before the pumpkin pie.

Thanks. A lot.

(I’ll be taking a week or two off from Blowin’ in the Wind.  I thank my readers, and Dale.)

Copyright © 2913 Deborah Streeter