Thankfulness

J.C. Leyendecker, Saturday Eve. Post cover, 1931

This week in America is when we celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday that isn't precisely what I was taught in school. It isn't really about those starving settlers and their native friends and being thankful for survival. True, the Pilgrims (early settlers in Massachusetts Colony) did have a dinner of celebration that involved Native Americans, but probably no turkey was harmed, and they weren't the first who had such a celebration in the New World, nor indeed in the entire world. The truth is that there have been feasts and celebrations of thanksgiving for centuries and a number of other countries celebrate their own Thanksgiving as an official holiday.

The American Thanksgiving is mostly a family feast day punctuated with football games and cranberry relish. That isn't to say people don't "return thanks" as my grandparents used to phrase it. But our American holiday as we celebrate it was actually rooted in the American Civil War. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln, in an attempt to foster unity, issued a proclamation setting the holiday for the final Thursday in November of that year for all states, assuring the nation of its ongoing prosperity, growth, and external peace (he was ignored by the rebelling states). It was a plea for thanksgiving, yes, but also a plea for continued confidence in his government. The Thanksgiving holiday was later set into federal law in the 1870s and modified to the fourth Thursday of November during World War II, as it is today. It continues officially to be a day of thanksgiving for the blessings endowed on a grateful nation.

So the American Thanksgiving isn't actually about Pilgrims and turkeys and all that. To me, besides being a day of thankfulness for our lucky status it ought to be a national day of contemplation, a day to seek common ground and be thankful, a day to unify, and a day to be humble. Why not reach across to others on the opposite side of whatever divides us? Surely we are stronger together. Why not be thankful for the strength comes with connecting to one's fellow humans instead of fighting?

For so many, life is a zero-sum experience: you win and someone else loses. But that is the way we all lose.