"Happy" Thanksgiving

Hello, and happy Thanksgiving. I hope you are enjoying this Thursday and having a happy holiday. I've never much cared for Thanksgiving. I've actually never been a huge fan of the holidays. Maybe it has something to do with the lead up to holidays and people stressing over them. Maybe it has to do with being surrounded by people, having to travel from place to place where ever a new crowd of people await. While I'm sure there are numerous reasons for a dislike of holidays, I think a more appropriate term is distaste. You see, quite literally, I don't like the taste of holidays. Easter brings ham, Christmas brings ham, and Thanksgiving offers a veritable smörgåsbord of foods that, to me, are basically unpalatable. Turkey I have to slather in barbecue sauce to get down, potatoes (of any sort) are a big no-no, yams, sweet potatoes, and stuffing couldn't be more repulsive. I definitely don't eat corn, green beans, or ham (which maybe some people eat on Thanksgiving?). Want to know a secret though? I like cranberry sauce. It's bizarre, I know. Growing up, cranberry sauce is the one think no one could stand and, for some reason, I liked it. I know know why. Cranberry sauce is sweet but tart, and has a weird smooth texture with it's edges ribbed from the inside of the can. Maybe, just maybe, that's all apart of its charm to me; it's the one thing no one else liked, so I gravitated to it. Then there's the other aspect of cranberry sauce I like. Care to take a guess as to what exactly that is? Give up? You open it up backwards. It's the one canned good (to my knowledge, anyway) that you open from the bottom. It's backwards, like me.

The other bad taste I get in my mouth from holidays is probably due to the massive over-commercialization of them due to our capitalist society. It's right there in the name. Capitalize. Where other cultures have centuries of spiritual traditions celebrated from carnivale-like proportions to the most humble ones, ours seem to be indebted to the other almighty: the green back, and as many of them as possible. Even the circumstances under which these holidays are celebrated have been twisted and mutated to fit the ideals of a capitalist society. Let's take a look, shall we?

Thanksgiving, oh a lovely holiday celebrating the pilgrims who sat down to a lovely, peaceful meal with the native Americans giving thanks for all that they had. Like a giant turkey in the middle of the table. Maybe the "indians" were thankful to the pilgrims for bringing their firearms, which undoubtedly made catching and killing the bird that much easier. Or maybe the Quakers brought their guns because they wanted the natives to know who at the table held all the cards, who was boss; the meal was, after all, to establish an alliance. Naturally, women weren't in attendance. Not exactly what I'd call a happy thanksgiving. So how did Thanksgiving become what it is today? The good old-fashioned way: lobbyists.

According to NPR, magazine editor Sarah Joseph Hale petitioned every level of government lobbying governors, every member of congress, and even the president for a national day where she, and the readers of her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book (I know, right?), could slave over an oven and stove for three days making far more food than necessary to give thanks for such a lovely bounty. Oh, and Lady Hale really liked turkeys. With that, Thanksgiving was born some three hundred (or so?) years after the "original" dinner.

And that, my friends, is how you create a holiday, and capitalize upon it.

Seriously though, enjoy the holiday at least for its most basic meaning: to give thanks, for whatever means something to you.

I leave you with this passage from Fox News host, John Stossel:

Had today's political class been in power in 1623, tomorrow's holiday would have been called "Starvation Day" instead of Thanksgiving. Of course, most of us wouldn't be alive to celebrate it.
Every year around this time, schoolchildren are taught about that wonderful day when Pilgrims and Native Americans shared the fruits of the harvest. But the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn't happen.
Long before the failure of modern socialism, the earliest European settlers gave us a dramatic demonstration of the fatal flaws of collectivism. Unfortunately, few Americans today know it.
The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally.
That's why they nearly all starved.

Of course, the truth is a bit different. If there was hardly any food as Mr. Stossel suggests, how and why would the pilgrims have had a three-day-long feast? Truth is, there was plenty of food, and the whole socialism thing? Yeah, not quite, it was more of a co-op which each farmer owning a share of the crops and farms. But to Fox, everything is socialist; and socialism is very, very bad.