What Is Thanksgiving?

Tomorrow, most Americans will eat too much, numb their minds watching football games, gain a couple of pounds and then call it a day.  That is the current American tradition.  The fact that this modern American tradition is antithetical to the spiritual and cultural roots of the holiday is probably unknown to most and would probably make no difference even if the religious significance of the holiday was known.

The first Thanksgiving was celebrated by religious fundamentalists who came to America to escape state persecution and Native Americans who took pity on a group of starving strangers and taught them how to survive in a strange land.  The original harvest time celebration was a sign of gratitude to God for their survival and to the Native Americans that God used to make it happen. There was joy but also piety, humility and gratitude, attributes sorely lacking in modern American society.

Thanksgiving became a national observance during the civil war when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed: "No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union."

The typical Thanksgiving feast was something I never experienced in my youth.  We were poor and my Mom didn't really believe in making much of a fuss over holidays.  We might have had a piece of ham, some pork chops or maybe a chicken.  But, there were no huge family celebrations and lavish meals.  Usually it was just the three of us over a modest meal in our humble little kitchen.  But, there was thankfulness at the table.  We had a modest but adequate little house with a roof that kept us dry and a gas stove that kept us warm.  The gas stove was a luxury that some of our neighbors did not share.  We all had clothes that fit us, kept us warm and were decent enough to go out in.  There was plenty of food, even if it wasn't fancy.  We missed no meals.  We had a reliable car.  Those were all things my former sharecropper mother and "living on the road" Okie father often didn't have in their youth and they felt blessed to have them.

In the latter years of Mom's life we reverted to that pattern.  For the last fifteen or so years of her life, Mom refused to leave her home for holiday celebrations.  So, most years, Sheila and I would cook a turkey dinner at our home in Tulsa, put it in a ice chest to keep it warm and drive to Gans to eat it with Mom. Again, just three of us in Mom's humble little kitchen.  Sometimes she was grateful, sometimes she may not have been.  Mom was ill and her moods were a part of that illness. But, we did it anyway because the Thanksgiving meal is about more than having a good time and eating a good meal.  It is about faith, family, duty and honor.  I couldn't have enjoyed myself anywhere knowing that Mom was sitting alone while we celebrated.

In these past few years since Mom's death, I have had a lot of time to think about what I want from the Thanksgiving celebration.  I have no stomach for sanitized, secular, multi-cultural interpretations of a tradition with such profound Christian roots and I have no patience with people who try to force their secular corruption of one of America's most sacred religious traditions upon me.  And, for that matter, I can do without the football games and massive parades of inflated symbols of spiritual and moral emptiness. I want to freely and openly thank God for the multiple blessings he has bestowed upon us in the past year and humbly beseech his continued blessings in the year to come.  That's it. Without that, the whole tradition is nothing more than an empty exercise in gluttony and excess that I can do without.