How to Save Thanksgiving
How to Save Thanksgiving
Derek B. Miller
I am preparing for Thanksgiving from a great distance. It is a distance of space and time. I’m in Oslo, Norway, and the people who celebrate it — my compatriots — are far away. Norway has adopted almost every American trope and commercial impulse one can imagine, but this is simply one cultural product that is stubbornly rooted in soil. Unlike Halloween, this one isn’t going to wash over me here. I have to reach across the world and bring it over and try and explain it to my kids.
Explain what, exactly? In our revisionism, in our striving for a new humanist moral foundation on which to stand — however destructive the method, however mechanical the process — we can no longer have the Thanksgiving we used to have (assuming we ever had it). We don’t get to have the one that Charlie Brown gets to have. The one awash in watercolors and small town, idyllic life. One impervious to the times and politics and the sounds of discord on the streets and academic journals. One that is hermetic in its immutability, and exists more as a mood and a smell and a sense of wellbeing than a holiday or break or respite.
That’s the one I want, of course. That’s my north star. Well, maybe not Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving per se. I’d rather have Lucy’s. I’d rather do Thanksgiving than have it done to me as she’s always the one holding the football but … you understand.
The story we’re meant to celebrate is clear enough. A bunch of pilgrims in 1620, in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, were starving. Through industry, cooperation with the local tribes, and their generosity towards us (we were all there) they managed to survive the winter and press on, helping create America. We give thanks to that experience and also craft a story of national origin. We then relive and enact that moment as ritual.
We don’t look at it from a distance. We don’t take a suspecting glance at it and keep it at arms length. Thanksgiving is a shared performance of the most sensual kind: Food and wine and talk and sport. There’s no sitting this holiday out. There’s no place to stand apart from it. You have to roll up your sleeves and kick up those heels and enact it.
What’s hard to think about — emotionally, historically, but also from the context of the performance — is what happened afterward. The smallpox and broken treaties and lies and massacres and self-delusion, and fabricated history, and myth-making. The utter destruction of the native American communities and cultures. All of that cries out silently, pleading for a mature nation — a moral nation — to better understand itself so we all can grow into a better one.
Thanksgiving, clearly, had its victors and its vanquished. It has its Jews who crossed through the Red Sea for the Promised Land and it had its Egyptians who didn’t make it. I mention this for a reason.
I’m Jewish too, so — from a distance — I lasso Passover to Norway and pull it on over too. I tell the kids about how we were slaves in Egypt (possibly not, but let’s run with it) and about the plagues (ditto) and the parting of the Red Sea (double ditto). But then … something nice happens in that meal. Something I’ve never seen in another culture and it’s one that makes Passover deep and important and worthwhile for me. As we read off the names of each plague that tortured Egypt so we could be free, we dip a finger into our glass of red wine and remove a drop, placing it on a napkin. We do this each time the name of the plague is read aloud. And we do it so that we remember those who suffered and died so we could be free. We do not drink a full measure of wine knowing that others died so we could be happy.
America, it seems to me, is on the cusp of either coming to a mature reconciliation with its past or else being divided and hence destroyed by the internal contradictions. If we love our country we have to recognize the situation we’re in and come to a solution to address it. There is simply no other way.
The Jews, in my view, have found an elegant and poetic expression for addressing the harm that preceded freedom. It is a ritual, a gesture, that serves to carry cultural wisdom forward through time. Americans, as yet, have not. What we’ve achieved (and it is glorious what we have achieved) is reposed upon slavery and mass murder and lies and we have yet to find even the smallest gestures to attend to that truth. So … what do we do?
This year, Thanksgiving will be a battleground of political animosity. One doesn’t need to read tea leaves to know this. There is a pathway forward, though, and I think the Passover ritual holds a clue.
Here is one important truth followed by a suggestion to consider.
The truth is this: Things do not always continue for the reasons they begin. They also don’t have to.
We do not necessarily stay married for the reasons we got married. We do not necessary live where we do for the reasons we moved there. Time and experience and judgement and reason and emotion and circumstance — the full drama of biography — changes our motive forces into something else. There is no reason we need to come to a shared agreement of America’s past and the origins of Thanksgiving in order to do it better and enjoy it now.
Here’s the challenge: We need a means — a performance — to say that progress doesn’t come by throwing out the past but rather by embracing and confronting and understanding it; one that reveals that we don’t need to reshape our history to create a moral lesson but rather we can create a new moral lesson with the raw stuff of our history; one that says we can be grateful for the America we have and that giving true thanks only comes by holding fast to the eternal values that unite us as a community — not as individuals fleeing history and one another, but as a community anchored in a real history and intent on making a better one. And Thanksgiving should be fun and happy and sincere.
Here’s my suggestion: I propose that every American family set out a place setting at our tables, and pile it with food and fill it with wine, and leave that place empty. We leave it empty to remember that our table will never be complete. That not all of us are here to share the moment. That we give thanks for what we have while remembering that what we have came at a cost. We remember the Jewish idea that questions unite us and answers divide us. So we create a space for questions without the burden of answers. We invite our children to ask about the empty chair, and we find a way to talk to each other about it — because the talk itself is virtuous. Because the talk is uniting.
In this way, Thanksgiving remains the holiday we want, while it becomes something more: it becomes the vehicle for remembering, not forgetting. It becomes the way we grow by talking with one another rather than conspiring in our silence. And in this way we do what Lincoln asked for us to do when he codified Thanksgiving in a proclamation in 1863 — in the midst of the Civil War — which was to use the opportunity to “heal the wounds of the nation.”
________
Derek B. Miller (Ph.D) is the author of six novels, most recently How To Find Your Way in the Dark. He lives in Oslo, Norway with his wife and two children.
Derek B. Miller
I am preparing for Thanksgiving from a great distance. It is a distance of space and time. I’m in Oslo, Norway, and the people who celebrate it — my compatriots — are far away. Norway has adopted almost every American trope and commercial impulse one can imagine, but this is simply one cultural product that is stubbornly rooted in soil. Unlike Halloween, this one isn’t going to wash over me here. I have to reach across the world and bring it over and try and explain it to my kids.
Explain what, exactly? In our revisionism, in our striving for a new humanist moral foundation on which to stand — however destructive the method, however mechanical the process — we can no longer have the Thanksgiving we used to have (assuming we ever had it). We don’t get to have the one that Charlie Brown gets to have. The one awash in watercolors and small town, idyllic life. One impervious to the times and politics and the sounds of discord on the streets and academic journals. One that is hermetic in its immutability, and exists more as a mood and a smell and a sense of wellbeing than a holiday or break or respite.
That’s the one I want, of course. That’s my north star. Well, maybe not Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving per se. I’d rather have Lucy’s. I’d rather do Thanksgiving than have it done to me as she’s always the one holding the football but … you understand.
The story we’re meant to celebrate is clear enough. A bunch of pilgrims in 1620, in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, were starving. Through industry, cooperation with the local tribes, and their generosity towards us (we were all there) they managed to survive the winter and press on, helping create America. We give thanks to that experience and also craft a story of national origin. We then relive and enact that moment as ritual.
We don’t look at it from a distance. We don’t take a suspecting glance at it and keep it at arms length. Thanksgiving is a shared performance of the most sensual kind: Food and wine and talk and sport. There’s no sitting this holiday out. There’s no place to stand apart from it. You have to roll up your sleeves and kick up those heels and enact it.
What’s hard to think about — emotionally, historically, but also from the context of the performance — is what happened afterward. The smallpox and broken treaties and lies and massacres and self-delusion, and fabricated history, and myth-making. The utter destruction of the native American communities and cultures. All of that cries out silently, pleading for a mature nation — a moral nation — to better understand itself so we all can grow into a better one.
Thanksgiving, clearly, had its victors and its vanquished. It has its Jews who crossed through the Red Sea for the Promised Land and it had its Egyptians who didn’t make it. I mention this for a reason.
I’m Jewish too, so — from a distance — I lasso Passover to Norway and pull it on over too. I tell the kids about how we were slaves in Egypt (possibly not, but let’s run with it) and about the plagues (ditto) and the parting of the Red Sea (double ditto). But then … something nice happens in that meal. Something I’ve never seen in another culture and it’s one that makes Passover deep and important and worthwhile for me. As we read off the names of each plague that tortured Egypt so we could be free, we dip a finger into our glass of red wine and remove a drop, placing it on a napkin. We do this each time the name of the plague is read aloud. And we do it so that we remember those who suffered and died so we could be free. We do not drink a full measure of wine knowing that others died so we could be happy.
America, it seems to me, is on the cusp of either coming to a mature reconciliation with its past or else being divided and hence destroyed by the internal contradictions. If we love our country we have to recognize the situation we’re in and come to a solution to address it. There is simply no other way.
The Jews, in my view, have found an elegant and poetic expression for addressing the harm that preceded freedom. It is a ritual, a gesture, that serves to carry cultural wisdom forward through time. Americans, as yet, have not. What we’ve achieved (and it is glorious what we have achieved) is reposed upon slavery and mass murder and lies and we have yet to find even the smallest gestures to attend to that truth. So … what do we do?
This year, Thanksgiving will be a battleground of political animosity. One doesn’t need to read tea leaves to know this. There is a pathway forward, though, and I think the Passover ritual holds a clue.
Here is one important truth followed by a suggestion to consider.
The truth is this: Things do not always continue for the reasons they begin. They also don’t have to.
We do not necessarily stay married for the reasons we got married. We do not necessary live where we do for the reasons we moved there. Time and experience and judgement and reason and emotion and circumstance — the full drama of biography — changes our motive forces into something else. There is no reason we need to come to a shared agreement of America’s past and the origins of Thanksgiving in order to do it better and enjoy it now.
Here’s the challenge: We need a means — a performance — to say that progress doesn’t come by throwing out the past but rather by embracing and confronting and understanding it; one that reveals that we don’t need to reshape our history to create a moral lesson but rather we can create a new moral lesson with the raw stuff of our history; one that says we can be grateful for the America we have and that giving true thanks only comes by holding fast to the eternal values that unite us as a community — not as individuals fleeing history and one another, but as a community anchored in a real history and intent on making a better one. And Thanksgiving should be fun and happy and sincere.
Here’s my suggestion: I propose that every American family set out a place setting at our tables, and pile it with food and fill it with wine, and leave that place empty. We leave it empty to remember that our table will never be complete. That not all of us are here to share the moment. That we give thanks for what we have while remembering that what we have came at a cost. We remember the Jewish idea that questions unite us and answers divide us. So we create a space for questions without the burden of answers. We invite our children to ask about the empty chair, and we find a way to talk to each other about it — because the talk itself is virtuous. Because the talk is uniting.
In this way, Thanksgiving remains the holiday we want, while it becomes something more: it becomes the vehicle for remembering, not forgetting. It becomes the way we grow by talking with one another rather than conspiring in our silence. And in this way we do what Lincoln asked for us to do when he codified Thanksgiving in a proclamation in 1863 — in the midst of the Civil War — which was to use the opportunity to “heal the wounds of the nation.”
________
Derek B. Miller (Ph.D) is the author of six novels, most recently How To Find Your Way in the Dark. He lives in Oslo, Norway with his wife and two children.
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