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.