Thanksgiving

Today the sun is shining over frosted grass. The air is warm enough to float broken panes of ice on the roadside. Back in the U.S., friends and family sleep; and in Seattle, a cold front foiled travelers and Christmas markets but completed for others a week of togetherness and celebration.

Today is Thanksgiving.

I have spent several weeks helping prepare for a Thanksgiving party here at Dráva Völgye Középiskola, and so, for the first time since elementary school, I had to learn what Thanksgiving is (more than turkeys and pilgrims?).

Thanksgiving is the only holiday besides July Fourth which is totally American in origin. This certainly heightens its profile. But I can tell a better story about Independence Day than I can about Thanksgiving, in which pilgrims wearing black flee England and start a colony, meet a friendly Indian, give Hester Prynne a scarlet letter and burn some witches and then create the Motion Picture Association of America.

Researching the holiday, I learned facts as well:

First, it was King James’s England they were rebelling against -- Shakespeare’s England. King James demanded attendance at Church of England services, charging fees and penalties for those who missed the approved Sunday mass. The Puritans felt strangled by such rules. (Meanwhile, it was Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans who strangled and then demolished Shakespeare’s Globe theatre 20 years later.) From England, the pilgrims first tried Holland, abandoning it when their kids became a little too Dutch. When they finally set out for the New World, this group represented only 44 people on the Mayflower. They called themselves Saints.

More than half did not survive the first winter. Many of us know about the alliance pilgrims made with friendly natives who helped them survive and prosper. I learned additionally that Squanto, the one who taught them to tap trees and use decayed fish to enrich soil for corn and other crops, the one who showed them which plants were poisonous and which medicinal, who, in short, was responsible for a turnaround in fate, Squanto knew his English because he had been kidnapped and brought to Spain by an Englishman who intended to sell him for £20, and after a few years in England, Squanto found his way home. He spoke English, which was a gift to the settlers. He was available, because his tribe had been wiped out in an epidemic. In short, English kidnappers and English disease put Squanto in position to be the English friend.

An op-ed piece in the New York Times by David Hall provides another reading of Thanksgiving history, one especially useful for Tea Party historians who look back fondly on the Christian roots of America. Hall points to colonists fiercely protective of religious freedoms, purposefully keeping ministers from civil authority and preventing churches from imposing civil law, so that anyone could worship his own way. Hall also writes that “the colonists hungered to recreate the ethics of love and mutual obligation spelled out in the New Testament. Church members pledged to respect the common good and to care for one another.” His last paragraph is potent:

Why does it matter whether we get the Puritans right or not? The simple answer is that it matters because our civil society depends, as theirs did, on linking an ethics of the common good with the uses of power. In our society, liberty has become deeply problematic: more a matter of entitlement than of obligation to the whole. Everywhere, we see power abused, the common good scanted. Getting the Puritans right won’t change what we eat on Thanksgiving, but it might change what we can be thankful for and how we imagine a better America.

I did try to communicate some of this, and some of the larger context of European settlers and conquistadors; but mostly I talked about the piece that we know best about Thanksgiving, and the thing that remains most true for me: Thanksgiving is a time when everyone has a home, when everyone has enough to eat, and when those we love sit with us in a warm room. It is a time to feel safe and to know the bounty of our lives.

Therefore, the traditional story, however distorted, still has resonance for me: the pilgrims barely survived their winter and struggled to make a home; Squanto and others emerged from a brutalized and decimated people. But on this day, according to Edward Winslow’s 1621 journal, they gathered together; and “although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

Below are pictures from DVK’s Thanksgiving Pageant, in which we sang “Amazing Grace” and “Simple Gifts,” put on a fifteen minute play, gave thanks to our neighbors, and played games of find the turkey, push the pumpkin, and pass the popcorn. And apple-bobbing, of course.


 
 
 
 
 

Sophie’s Blog: The Big Clock in Prague

On Autumn break, we visited four different places, Salzburg, Schwangau, Prague, and Vienna.

In Prague, near our apartment, we saw an old clock tower with clocks that has been working for centuries. The clock tower not only had clocks that showed time, but a clock that showed the stages of the moon. We saw a blue shade open and statues of people move in a circle from the inside. We could see the people’s faces through the little windows. After that, a trumpet player played a short tune. The many crowds of people clapped and cheered after that was over.

Amelia's blog: On the way to Salzburg

Friday October 29^th

We were in the car for about five hours on our way to Salzburg, Austria. We went from Barcs to  Slovenia. In Slovenia we bought a vignette and started going. We got to the mountains very quickly and we constantly went inside long boring tunnels under the mountains. Finally the mountains parted revealing a big grassy plain with trees spotted here and there. Then we got to the border crossing and we got a matrica vignette. We drove through the hills and the plains, and slowly, gradually we entered Salzburg.

Maisie’s Blog: Prague Was Pretty (Prag Szep Volt)

We went to salzburg hohenschwangau prague vienna. In prague there was a very beautiful clock! It seemed to glow gold in the night. There were always people waiting to see the clock go off. Little people walked around in the window when the clock went off. One man in the tower always played his trumpet when the clock went off. Also in prague we stayed in an apartment! It had three little beds, so Amelia and Sophie and I each had our own, but we weren’t all in the same room. 

Vienna

In Vienna we stayed in a wonderful pension in the heart of the old part of the city, a block away from St. Stephen's Cathedral.

Highlights of the trip include a horse and carriage ride into the city, a visit to the Belverdere Palace Klimt collection, riding the Riesenrad -- the Vienna wheel first built in 1897 (5 years after George Ferris's Chicago wheel), and a tour of the Hofburg Palace, 

As for the last, we had been seeing posters, boxes, calendars, coffee table books, and all sorts of other memorabilia devoted to a beautiful woman named, in italics and with a whisper, Sissi. Brief forays into these materials told me she was an empress of Austria, Elisabeth of Bavaria. The Hofburg Palace was the winter home she shared with her husband, Franz Joseph, who reigned as emperor for 67 years until World War I. Even so, even as the last empress: why so many pictures? She's certainly pleasant to look at, but what makes her otherwise so iconographic? 

The Hofburg Palace hosted a detailed museum to Elisabeth's life -- including public perception and private despair. I learned that it was she who brought Austria and Hungary together; the picture above, in fact, is her coronation portrait as the Queen of Hungary. But Elisabeth married early to the claustrophobic life of the imperial court, and the exhibit is haunted by her lonely poetry, made no less bitter when her son, Rudolph, at age 31, shot his 16 year old girl friend before turning the gun on himself.

Hungary's relationship to Elisabeth, as I discovered the next week when I asked in school, is as complicated as Hungary's relationship to the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself, but it seems mostly positive. I went with the drama students to the Csiky Gergyely Színház in Kaposvár, where we were treated, through a one-day open-house, to roam the building, and where the theater was preparing for their production of Erzsébet.

At right you can see a prop of an all-important accessory -- her ghostly dress.

Back in Vienna, one of the things we learned was how much Elisabeth worked on her hair (2-3 hours a day) and her body (and its 20 inch waist). At one point in the tour, in 40 rooms devoted not to Sissi but to the imperial cutlery, I stopped at a beautifully crafted but mysterious-looking press that turned out to the one piece in the museum to squeeze everything together: silver, power, claustrophobia, cult of beauty. The object at left is a duck squeezer, and this is the answer. How did the empress stay so thin? Kacsalé, as I reported to students the next week. She didn't eat the ducks served to her: she drank them.

If you are like Stephanie and don't believe me, please click on the placard at right, which I photographed just for such disbelievers.

Our stay produced more traditional experiences and observations as well. Therefore, no more words, except for the part where I talk about the woman who gave us the horse and carriage ride.

 

Above, our 20 year old driver. Below, what came out of her mouth during the rise, from a combination of German and English: 

You, you don't belong there. Get on the sidewalk. Get on the sidewalk. Get off the road. Get on the sidewalk. Get your dog off the road! Get him off! And keep him on a leash. You want horses to stomp your dog? This is not a place to have a dog unleashed. There is the hunting lodge. Look at this. Look what he's doing, trotting his horse! How would you like it if you had to trot all the way through the park? Would you like that? Would you like that? How would you like that? Huh? Girls? What would that be like for you? Would you like it? No, you wouldn't.

Prague

The drive into Prague included cobblestone streets, cars and pedestrians going all directions at once, trams honking at vehicles stopped on tracks, and one man yelling at my Hungary plates. Once there, however, we were really there: Prague, a place I was planning to see since friends returned from there in high school, and again after my first year of teaching, when I shared a room with a Praha man who was touring the U.S. and somehow found himself in Brewster, near Wenatchee, where my car had broken down. Here, in Prague, I was happy to shelve the car and get on foot, a means more relaxing and above all slow enough to absorb the city's facades and structures, tastes and history.

Prague.

Above, in the distance, is the Charles bridge, a 650 year old pedestrian bridge, with fantastic figurines of saints perched at its sides. In the morning, a woman in an orange jumpsuit slowly crosses the bridge with a small broom, sweeping cigarette butts and soft leaves into a pan. A crew of men smoke in the recess by a statue of Christ before lowering a scaffold over the side to scrub old archways. Painters roll tables and easels by handtrucks and prepare to display their talents with caricatures or straight portraits of Angelina Jolie's lips and Barack Obama's ears. A few drunken leftovers laugh their way across the river. Tourists stretch out with their cameras. Workers and students commute to the other side. And lovers stroll.

At night, the city was alive with residents and tourists alert with festivity. When we arrived, the children were eager to stay at home after the sun went down, and we were still nervous about the rare car that would jet down the streets and throw pedestrians onto the narrow paths at the base of buildings, but my first glimpse of the Old Town Square was so magical, I ran back to our apartment, only 200-300 meters away, to bring everyone over.

Everyone was just in time to see the tolling of the great astronomical clock, which celebrated its 600th birthday last month. Every hour, mechanical saints revolve above the clock face, bells toll, and a man robed in motley red and yellow emerges from the tower and trumpets the time, first in one direction, then the other.

The Old Town Square was a reference point, in time and space, but also in history. It wasn't only the carriages and the gothic spires over the stoned cathedral than made me feel the nearness of the late middle ages, and the bustle of a prosperous city long ago; it was the way the tall old buildings faced each other in generous angles, the way streets radiated out in horse-thin spokes, it was the spacious intimacy of the square.






But the city was beautiful in every direction. As my friend here Nora said, Prague was spared the WWII destruction that Budapest was not; and as the Lonely Planet guide said, it's hard not to be awed by the "overachieving" architecture. After three nights, I still couldn't get used to the fact that from our bedroom window we could see a church from the 14th century filled with baroque treasures.

Walking in Prague was an utter joy.

We also had a memorable meal in a brewery recommended by Lackó (above left) and one late night concerto concert in a cold and beautiful cathedral by the Charles Bridge. Below is the Jewish Town Hall, centering several synagogues and cemetery in the Jewish quarter. I was interested in encountering history on Prague's golem, especially because our librarian at Roosevelt had extensively researched the automaton, but I was content to stay outside and keep walking. 

Feel free to walk around yourself, IN YOUR BRAIN. This web-tour is pretty good.

On the second day we walked up the stairs to the enormous castle complex, the Pražský hard. Much of what you see in the background of the picture below is a part of this.

We spent several hours wandering the palaces and cathedrals that dated from the 10th century.

By the time we emerged, we were very hungry, and took advantage of the slighter stubbier version of kürtöskalács they eat in the Czech Republic, trdelník.

I'm willing to go back to Prague someday, if anybody wants to join me.