Thanksgiving in a Time of Global Crisis
I ask whether I have the right to feel thankful when so many people are suffering.
Growing up, my family did not celebrate Christmas for religious reasons, so Thanksgiving was our grand family meal with traditions like my mom baking the pies the night before, and my brother and I making rugelach with the leftover dough while my dad browned pumpkin seeds in the oven. Mom would get up in the dark and get the turkey into the oven by seven. At our house, even Thanksgiving dinner was eaten at noon. We always had company, whether family or friends, and many times the kids had to sit at a table in the living room or in the kitchen because the dining table was overflowing. It was the meal where, at sixteen, I learned how to make twice baked potatoes and mock mince pie from my new Better Homes and Gardens Complete Step-by-Step Cook Book. (After all these years, this cookbook is still my go-to for holiday favorites, even though its pages are moldy and stuck together because it survived Hurricane Andrew.)
Lately however, it seems that Thanksgiving is under attack.
Even Martha Stewart has cancelled Thanksgiving. I mean, she can be excused – she’s in her 80s and she’s already made like one hundred turkeys this year. But it goes deeper than that. My son sent me an angry text when we were talking about him flying out for Thanksgiving. He was frustrated about his financial situation. The text (cleaned up a bit) roughly translates as “*#$! the Native Americans who let the pilgrims play them and *#$@ religion.” This from the little boy who came into our house at age six and thought that Thanksgiving was a holiday for getting drunk. I vowed to always make his Thanksgivings wonderful. But today, he has a point. What if the Native Americans had been able to put up a border wall to keep out the onslaught of destruction that was coming like a relentless flood toward them? I myself live on Acjachemen land. Are Native Americans celebrating their loss of life and culture, religions and traditions on Thursday? Somehow, I doubt it.
Last year my daughter’s boyfriend chose to stay home and watch football and play video games rather than attend our family gathering. He viewed Thanksgiving as a celebration of colonial oppression. Again, he’s not necessarily wrong. I probably should be celebrating Juneteenth, the date when, almost two and a half years after enslaved Black people were freed, Federal troops arrived in Texas to enforce that freedom. After all, Texas is where my earliest enslaved ancestor is recorded in a census around 1850. Raised in a white family, however, I didn’t learn about this holiday until recently.
This year, when I asked my daughter what she wanted to make, she said, “I don’t know. I may be too tired.” This the girl who helped me plan Thanksgiving menus for years. Twice I flew to Italy while she was living in Florence and cooked Thanksgiving dinner for her friends and roommates in a 500-year-old apartment close to the Duomo. It’s an artform to navigate food allergies, vegan and vegetarian preferences and make everyone happy, and we loved doing it.
Today, it’s the Saturday before Thanksgiving. My two refrigerators aren’t emptied out, my menu isn’t written, I’m not bustling around madly cleaning house. I’m trying to convince myself how much easier it will be to cook just for six people. It’s like, I don’t even need to make a menu. What’s the point of planning?
Where has my joy for this day gone?
Once my then husband and I moved to Florida and ate McDonalds take-out for our first Thanksgiving in our new state, we got into a habit of inviting others who had no family or place to go. It was a beautiful tradition that carried on for years – one of my dear friends came for 23 years, and after my divorce, her husband wielded the electric knife through the turkey breast until he passed away. Another family came for 9 years. They always brought the ice cream, and they made the carrot and green bean dishes in my kitchen. After dinner, the husband would nap on the couch with the newspaper Black Friday ads tenting his belly. To me, this was joy – friends, family, food, laughter, music on the piano (yes, even my stepfather’s horrible chord progressions that he always pounded out before falling asleep upright on the piano bench).
And now, here I am, doubting myself.
Should I be eating a bounty of food when people are starving in Palestine and don’t even have clean water to drink? When babies are being slaughtered? How can I feel safe when my Jewish friends are not feeling the same? Should I be smug with what I have when the people of Ukraine have no peace and millions of them are displaced? Should I be joyful when homeless line the streets of our cities with no end in sight? These questions leave me with a headache and a deep feeling of hopelessness. An insidious thought creeps into my head – “With all that’s going on in the world, why do you have the right to be thankful?”
Of course, this is a false thought – we always have the right to be grateful, but I know that this thought is just an excuse that hides unacknowledged sorrow beneath it. The reality is that there’s no way I can be reconciled to my dinner table set for six. To do so would mean that I would not be missing the presence of those who are not – my birthmother who always made the cranberry sauce three days late (it was great with leftovers on Saturday, too strong on the turkey on Thursday), my stepfather who grilled bacon wrapped jalapeños that were always gone before I had time to get out of the kitchen to try them, my dad who could peel an apple in one full slice, snap fava beans with a flick of the wrist, young Alex who went from her family’s house to ours throughout the Thanksgiving day and ate at both; the boyfriend who I was just about to celebrate a first Thanksgiving with. These losses make it hard to have the energy to face the joy of the current celebration.
It's as though I’m standing on a rock in the middle of a river where these memories are the sparkling reflections of Thanksgivings that have flowed in the path of the setting sun. It shocks me how quickly they are receding from view. When I turn to look into the Thanksgivings of the future, they are shrouded in fog that hides the oncoming bend of the river, cloaks the oncoming darkness of time.
This, of course, is why I must celebrate the Thanksgiving of now.
This Thanksgiving invites me to reflect on what I’ve done with my life this past year, how I’ve grown or diminished, what I’ve produced, how I’ve made things better for others, or not, how I can appreciate the bounty of my life and share it, how I can ease the pain of a stranger. To me, Thanksgiving is a harvest festival that celebrates the bounty gathered in at the end of the growing season. In the U.S. and Canada, our harvest festival has a moniker rooted in a perhaps mythical history that reminds us to be thankful that we’re still here, we have come out of tribulation, we have endured struggles, but the sun is shining, we are alive, and we have enough for ourselves and to share with others. Part of the myth is about strangers helping strangers survive. And that is a lot to be thankful for.
More broadly, a harvest festival is a community event that celebrates the fruit of the earth – a fruit that belongs to us all. It’s the ones living in peace, however, who have the ability to share with those whose lives are torn apart by suffering and war.
When I have so much today, I believe this means that I as a human should focus on ensuring that others in our global community don’t suffer and that there is enough for all and peace for all. This may seem so impossible.
But standing on the rock in the river, the remembrance of my adoptive father shimmers like sun rays falling through clouds above me and fills me with hope. He was a man of peace. He hated war and cried when he spoke of it. Yet, he was one of millions who fought a world war to help people he did not know on the other side of the planet. So today, even though I am one tiny voice, I hope my raised voice is a drop of water in a raging river pushing for peace for all.
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