Thanksgiving-Why It is My Favorite Holiday

People are surprised when I tell them that Thanksgiving is by far my favorite North American holiday, while I cannot truly explain my affinity for the holiday myself, I have a slew of clues from my life which does explain it: Fall is my favorite season, I love the change in weather, the sharp smell of Autumn, the turning of the leaves, the transition from light clothing to sweaters and coats all contribute to my passion for the holiday.

The legacies from this nation’s agrarian legacies which inspired the holiday appeals to the nostalgia, the transition that we go through between harvest and dormancy marks the end of one activity and the beginning of another, seeing the landscape morph from growing season to harvesting, it is a reminder from nature to observe the cyclical nature of our lives. I am drawn to the idea that after a long growing season, it is time to hibernate and rest in order to replenish ourselves as the deep dark of Winter envelopes us. Finally, there is also the tradition of the food, delicious of course but also substantial, comforting, , traditional, sustaining, and most importantly, communal.

While all those reasons are good ones, it still doesn’t explain why I am so enamored with the Thanksgiving season. So much so that I have come to resent the disappearance of Thanksgiving in our annual rituals as the hegemony of Halloween and Christmas encroaches on the Thanksgiving season.

So, I decided to look in my past to see just how Thanksgiving came to be so important in my psyche.

I came to this country as an immigrant bewildered by the American cultural habits and traditions. The strangeness, in my 13-year-old Chinese eyes, of the America of the 1970’s bewildered me and swallowed me up as nothing else has before or since. You would think that my previous experience with massive personal, social, physical, and habitual changes that had rocked my world would prepare me for the move to North America: I had moved from Taiwan, a country that I had known all of my life up until then, having been born there; to Honduras, a small Central American country that was different in just about every single aspect of my existence up to that point. I had to learn two languages: Spanish, because we were in Hispano-America, and English, because I was enrolled in the American School of Tegucigalpa. The school was where I first encountered the idea of Thanksgiving from my teachers, many of the faculty in the elementary school were Peace Corp volunteers from the US and they, being homesick, had made a great impression on us by enthusiastically introducing the traditions of Thanksgiving to us children.

The move from Honduras to Denver Colorado once again exploded my world, after having had it merely rocked a short four years earlier when I left Taiwan. Denver, was a state of mind that is completely alien to my nascent teenage mind. The foreignness of being plucked from the tropics and Hispanic culture of Honduras and being dropped in the wild west ethos of Denver was especially disorienting, especially after having done the same thing just four years earlier.

We moved to a modest ranch house on South Steele Street in the Denver suburb of Littleton. A yellow brick house with a seemingly endlessly large and verdant lawn, which I was responsible for, and two houses down from the back gate to Peabody Elementary school, my playground for the next few years. The turbulence of all the moving was assuaged by the promise of the normality that the suburbia experience engendered, this was where I was able to dampen the turbulence resulting from my two physical moves.

Our first Thanksgiving was spent in the home of my father’s colleague, who was the main reason we moved to Denver in the first place; he had vouched for my father’s skills as an engineer and had guided my family through the process of coming to America. We had stayed in his basement for a few weeks after we had arrived. I don’t remember the meal per se, but I do remember the familial warmth that was in abundance throughout the time spent in that house, that was officially our first Thanksgiving, ever. The profound meaning and resonance of Thanksgiving which would later grow to be my favorite holiday was just germinating at that time.  

A year later, my mom would preside over her own Thanksgiving feast, reciprocating the kindness of our new American friends by hosting newly immigrated Chinese families at our home. I vividly remember my mother endlessly worrying about her lack of experience in cooking the massive turkey that she had bought. She called our friend’s mother-in-law incessantly for two days straight trying to force-feed all the time garnered experience and knowledge from the poor lady through the phonelines. Our friend’s mother-in-law was pretty no-nonsense, but also incredibly patient. In the end, the meal was an unqualified success, a few things I remember was that my mom had substituted Chinese gluttonous rice for the dressing, we are Chinese after all; the lady had taught mom to use bacon slices to cover the joints where the legs and wings are attached to prevent the skin from breaking when it shrank, because I got to eat all that bacon; and the pride and relief on my mother’s face when my dad brought out the platter of turkey to the table as our new Chinese immigrant friends oohed and aahed over the spectacle,  she positively beamed with pride. I also remember that the pumpkin pies were store bought, she wasn’t that adventurous.

As I entered high school, our family became the elder statemen of the immigrant Chinese families, my parents became friendly with many new arrivals, most were younger professionals and we took turns hosting the big Thanksgiving feast. My parent organized the parties, giving each family their assignments on what to bring: tables, chairs, plates, and utensils, as well as the cornucopia of dishes of the feast. While we hewed to the American Thanksgiving tradition: we always had turkey; we always had pumpkin pie, sometimes homemade, sometimes not; we always had some semblance of American dressing along with all the Chinese dishes that made up our potluck meal, new traditions were being born from the ingenuity of our group. It became our own contribution to the traditions of our new home.

My first Thanksgiving away from home came in my freshman year of college. I moved to Champaign-Urbana to matriculate and I met up with a group of men, boy’s back then, that I am proud to still call my friends. I spent that Thanksgiving in the home of my new roommate Scot in Bensenville, a suburb of Chicago. It was just his family and I, but it made me feel whole after having gone through the emotional upheaval of not being able to go home to see my parents. It was a wonderful reminder of what friendship is and what friendship should mean, remember that I have known Scot for all of three months. From a culinary standpoint, I was also introduced to the wonders of pumpkin bread by Scot’s mom.  I remember being really excited that she sent a bunch of the pumpkin bread back to the dorms with us.

The day after the feast at Scot’s home, my gang of cohorts took me out on the town in Chicago, my first taste of the City of Big Shoulders. We visited the Museum of Science and Industry, had Pizza at the original Uno’s, ran around Marshall Fields looking for Santa, and saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Biograph theater, where John Dillinger was shot. Again, I have known these guys for three months, and they decided to dedicate a day to showing me their town, to share their friendship with me, to cultivate a relationship with me. It was the best of times, period.  It was also in Chicago that Thanksgiving where I was introduced to the magical tradition of It’s A Wonderful Life by my friend Marty. This reinforced special quality of the humanity that I have associated with Thanksgiving since then. It is true that movies like that are designed to be emotionally manipulative, but there are times that I willingly submit to emotional manipulations, because it is good to feel wanted. In retrospect I was happily surprised by the comradery coming from these guys that I have known for a scant three months. We have been lifelong friends, and my emotional attachment to them, at least in my mind,  came partially from that Thanksgiving.

Spending time alone on Thanksgiving is de rigueur for gradual students. It is a longish break where we are freed of classes, both taking them and teaching them; it is too short of a time to be homeward bound and it provides a nice respite from the rigors of gradual school. The first Thanksgiving I spent as a master’s student was pretty abysmal, which further reinforced the special place that Thanksgiving held in my mind. It was my first year in Atlanta, I had just been there for less than a year, I was self-funded which meant that I did not have a built in social circle that was centered around graduate assistants, those indentured and traditionally inexpensive workers who have an office, however meager, where they could establish a social network. I had to run furtively between classes, never having a way station to drop off books and to sit and rest, it was socially isolating. Thanksgiving that year was spent alone, sitting in my tiny apartment, a repurposed dentist examination room in a professional building just blocks from the Georgia Tech campus. I spent almost my entire break there, reading and doing my work. My Thanksgiving dinner was at The Varsity, an Atlanta and Georgia Tech dining institution. I do remember having a Frosty Orange and onion rings. I am not sure if I had the hot dog or the hamburger. It was melancholy at best.

The next year however, I had attained the status of a teaching assistant once I became a PhD student, I was happily ensconced in a bullpen office and I was surrounded by people, actual, living, interesting people. What was once my reality, which was akin to living in Plato’s cave, became a reality of a person who had surfaced from the captivity of the cave and was exposed to the reality that was colorful, alive, and three dimensional. It was that year that we all decided that we needed to spend Thanksgiving together. My newly found friend Yogi had become gainfully employed in Washington DC and had offered his luxurious one-bedroom apartment as a flophouse for the bunch of us to use as a way-station on our visit. We planned on a widely anticipated tourist trip to the nation’s capital, hitting all the hotspots. We rented a couple of cars and we happily drove to DC and set to work cooking a meal that was fit for kings. We worked assiduously on our meal, the food tasted scrumptious because it’s flavor was powerfully enhanced by a communal spirit that permeated the gathering, it was appreciated by all. For a historical landmark, we saw the Doug Flutie hail Mary pass that gave Boston College its improbable defeat of Miami.

As time wore on, I spent most of my Thanksgivings in my gradual school toils. Dining alone in less than holiday fashion stopped being so depressing as I got used to the feeling, and I even looked forward to spending alone time away from the maddening crowd, a trait most common amongst the introverts. One year a fellow gradual student and his wife decided that they wanted to have a good old-fashioned Thanksgiving, with many people and celebrate the spirit of friendship, gratitude, and hospitality. They were living in married student housing, a concrete pile optimistically painted in vibrant colors in order to dispel the gloom of the 1970’s architectural excesses. They posted notices all around the compound, invited fellow gradual students from the office who had nowhere else to go and the party was on. My friend and his wife splurged on a turkey and they cooked it, everyone else came with a covered dish. Since this was a gradual student happening, the menu was overwhelmingly non-American. We did have some of the usual Thanksgiving staples, but the tables were groaning under the weight of dishes from Hong King, China, Japan, Korea, India, Lebanon, Egypt, Iceland, France, Germany, Mexico, Venezuela, et. Al. It was a United Nations of food. There was a certain cache of libations as well: Black Death from Iceland, soju from Korea, arak from Lebanon, mao-tai from China, and… well, you get the idea. Kids played, adults laughed and talked about our experiences in America; we tried to explain American football, Detroit Lions, and the Dallas Cowboys to our friends, we threw the football around, or we tried to, as electrical engineering gradual students don’t tend to do that very well, I was surprised that we even had a football. It made our shared experience as scholars that much more pleasant. We made future friends, we helped each other deal with our collective loneliness, we gave each other a small piece of ourselves and our cultures, and we had an exceptional meal.

All the experiences that I have related here, had enforced my personal belief that Thanksgiving is by far my most cherished and favorite holiday, far outdistancing Christmas. The graciousness shown by the lady who taught my mom how to make the turkey; the generosity that my father’s colleague had shown our family by inviting us to his home and table; the bonding of the many in a foreign society; the kindness and friendship that my cohorts in college and grad school had shown me and anyone who participated in those special celebrations; the gratitude that everyone experienced because of the generous nature of strangers who decided to live the spirit of Thanksgiving rather than just spend their days in a tryptophan induced coma while sitting in front of the television watching really bad football. Even the dark days of living alone in a squalid gradual student dump while dining on The Varsity’s fare, served to reinforce and renew my faith in the sanctity of the holiday.

Today, the Thanksgiving holiday is suffering, as I have said previously, from the hegemony of other holidays as well as the criminal and genocidal practices of the people who were at the center of the Thanksgiving mythology. Thanksgiving did not become a holiday until 1863, during Abraham Lincoln’s term. The mythology of the pilgrims and the native Americans which saved their lives was just that, a mythology. Indeed, what the descendants of the pilgrims did to the native American descendants in the name of religion and self-serving interests is absolutely criminal. As a result, there is a call to not observe Thanksgiving, which I think is unfortunate. This would obviate all of the reasons that I have listed as being the driving motivation for my own love of the event, indeed it would also serve the purposes of the commerce minded descendants of the pilgrims and allow Halloween roll straight into Christmas.

In the end, it isn’t the fictional mythology surrounding Thanksgiving or the trite stories of the pilgrims and the native Americans breaking bread together. In the end, it is the people who you choose spend time with: to express gratitude for all that we have, to mark the cycles of life as it flows inexorably onward, to reflect and ruminate upon life, friendship, spirit of the community, and amity, which makes it special.

It wasn’t until much later in my life that I found a piece of writing that profoundly encapsulated the spirit of Thanksgiving in my mind. Ironically it was a Thanksgiving Proclamation written by Governor Wilbur Cross of Connecticut in 1936 which gave the best, most concise, and most profound statement about Thanksgiving for me.

Here it is.

Time out of mind at this turn of the seasons when the hardy oak leaves rustle in the wind and the frost gives a tang to the air and the dusk falls early and the friendly evenings lengthen under the heel of Orion, it has seemed good to our people to join together in praising the Creator and Preserver, who has brought us by a way that we did not know to the end of another year. In observance of this custom, I appoint Thursday, the twenty-sixth of November, as a day of Public Thanksgiving for the blessings that have been our common lot and have placed our beloved State with the favored regions of earth – for all the creature comforts: the yield of the soil that has fed us and the richer yield from labor of every kind that has sustained our lives – and for all those things, as dear as breath to the body, that quicken man’s faith in his manhood, that nourish and strengthen his spirit to do the great work still before him: for the brotherly word and act; for honor held above price; for steadfast courage and zeal in the long, long search after truth; for liberty and for justice freely granted by each to his fellow and so as freely enjoyed; and for the crowning glory and mercy of peace upon our land; – that we may humbly take heart of these blessings as we gather once again with solemn and festive rites to keep our Harvest Home.
Given under my hand and seal of the State at the Capitol, in Hartford, this twelfth day of November, in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and thirty six and of the independence of the United State [sic] the one hundred and sixty-first.
Wilbur L. Cross

I wish you all a most happy, meaningful, and delicious Thanksgiving.

MLK Jr. Day-2019

It is hard to believe that it has been thirty-three years since the first MLK Jr Remembrance Day. I was a gradual student at Georgia Tech at the time and since I was living in the city where Dr. King had lived and worked, we were right in the middle of the action.

While I was cognizant of the civil rights movement and it’s meaning, and I was aligned with its goals, I was not fully engaged in the holiday nor in the intent of the movement until that watershed year.

I was a member of the Graduate Student Senate at Georgia Tech at the time and a cross was burned in the front lawn of the first African-American sorority on campus the year prior. Georgia Tech owns all the land on campus, and they rent the houses out to the fraternities and sororities, and the competition for the privilege to have a house on campus was fierce. One had come vacant and the administration decided to rent it to an African-American sorority. There was a lot of discontent and rumbling amongst the Greek system, which is not surprising since Georgia Tech was deep in Dixie and the traditions surrounding the school are deeply rooted in the ante-bellum south. It was an annual tradition during rush week to have the dean of students lead a charge up Library Hill wearing a Confederate general’s outfit on a horse as the fraternity members from his fraternity charged up that hill with him.

Our president, Joseph Pettit, a genteel and introspective scholar, instituted measure to review the racial climate on campus as well as instituted educational sessions for every administrators and student leaders. This was how I was selected to be a small group of students who were being trained by Dr. Charles King, a civil rights activist and educator. Yes, the dean of students was ordered to attend as well, not with the students’ group but with all the administrators, including Dr. Pettit. It was a very tough session, going deep into our internal biases and beliefs. Our longest help beliefs were examined, and we were called out on our most cherished beliefs and they were exposed as myths. It was in the middle of this that the state of Georgia was slowly implementing plans to celebrate the very first MLK Jr. Day.

I remember attending the that first celebration, the center of the celebration was around Ebenezer Baptist Church and the corridor leading up the Martin Luther King Jr Center for Nonviolent Social Change, the MLK Jr. historical district, and Dr. King’s childhood home. There was an ecumenical service with assorted dignitaries and all kinds of festivities. This was a big deal for the community and for the city of Atlanta.

I went to the Sweet Auburn area for no real reason except to bask in the festivities and to witness the joys and celebration of the very first celebration. I walked amongst the stalls and businesses selling commemorative souvenirs, in the tradition of American entrepreneurship. There was joy but it was also somewhat subdued, as if people couldn’t believe that this was actually happening. I watched the parade as it made its way down Auburn Avenue towards the MLK Jr Center. For sheer contrast of the two Americas, you only had to look at the two bands that were there to march. The first was the Marine Corp. Band. THE Marine Corp Band, whose director was John Phillip Souza. Sharply dressed, the epitome of musical excellence and discipline. Marching in precision and giving off the aura of gravitas as intended, the musical selection was as expected, patriotic, solemn, almost severe. The other band was the Grambling state marching band, no less accomplished musically but more freeform, more creative, more informal, and much more joyous and celebratory. They did their steps and they marched as if they were entertaining at a football game. It was a raucous celebration and I had believed that this was a moment in time that we as a nation had reaching a turning point. The juxtaposition of the band’s was not lost on me, although I just took note of the difference in my mind and chalked it up to cultural differences. Little did I know that the differences would be make itself abundantly clear in the most hateful way.

One of the few municipalities to not recognize MLK Jr Day was Cummings Georgia, a small community in Forsyth County in north Georgia. Cummings today is very different from the Cummings of 1986. Cummings in 1986 was a small rural community, but it had the ignominious reputation, along with many other Georgia communities where blacks re not allowed to be in town after sundown. There are no black citizens in Cummings, let alone black property owners, as the white citizens of the community chased all the black people who used to live there out of town in 1912, the purported reason? Black men were accused of raping white women in Forsyth County, three black men were murdered by lynching at that time and the white citizenry gladly stole their properties and made it their own.

In 1987, there was a case of a group of black people being assaulted while enjoying a day out on the lake while black. Rev. Hosea Williams led a peace march through downtown Cummings and were also attacked. The following week, there was a call for another march through Cummings. Georgia Tech leaders after having been educated through the Dr. Charles King training rented buses for anyone who wanted to go and participate. My friend Janet talked me into going, as representatives of the Graduate Student Government. I was very scared, I had been warned about the white supremacists in the north Georgia mountains and was leery of engaging them directly. But this time, we had anything from 15,000 to 25,000 people of all kinds descending on Cummings. A line of Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the state highway patrol standing with locked arms along the march route, about a mile outside of town. They were between us and the white hood clad Klansman, who were spouting hate, spitting, threatening us with harm. Just as we were wavering, a drag queen of local renown in Atlanta stepped forward shouldering a boombox, dress in fishnet stocking and hot pants. She sauntered down the street as if it was a runway and led us down towards downtown. We were thus emboldened and marcjed along timidly behind.

There were many surreal moments in the short march, I remember the eerie silence along the way, no one said much. The silence pierced by the occasional spouted hate from behind the police cordon. I remember little kids wearing mini Klan hoods. I suspect they are the present-day hate mongers that we see in Charlottesville and other places. I remember looking to the faces behind the lines and seeing the defiant looks. I also remember the expressionless and blank stares of the GBI and state troopers, making it seem like it was just another day at the office. The rest of the march was a blur. I remember that both senators from Georgia, Sam Nunn and Wyche Fowler were giving speeches, but I was too preoccupied to pay much attention. We walked back to the buses and went home. I remember watching CNN’s coverage of us and getting a little pumped up over what I did. I want to say that I knew that it wasn’t over, that the battle over equality and amity between the black and white was far from being settled, but I wanted to believe this, that my little part in the very large picture was what made the difference, even though I knew very little was accomplished.

Cumming is now a booming town; the town is integrated and is enjoying an economic renaissance. This is the thirty-third celebration of MLK Jr day. Yet, the chasm between the races are as big, if not bigger than ever, fueled by the renewed hatred from the financially disenfranchised whites who believe that the racial differences are what is keeping them from economic prosperity and a cynical national political machinery that deliberately take advantage of that idea by using the race card to divides the economically disenfranchised into black and white, so create a haven for their craven purposes.

I think back to those two days in my past and I am torn between two poles, between elation and despair, between hopefulness and hopelessness, between the remnants of my youthful idealism and my well-earned cynicism. That is where I am on this MLK Jr Day, 2019.

Blog Post-Trite

I transitioned from Isaac Newton Junior High to Arapahoe High School, going to the big school with all its attendant cliques and high school social drama.

I was also transitioning from special English to a regular English class. I started to learn English when I was nine years old in Central America, and by the time my family moved to Littleton Colorado, I was speaking and understanding the English language, but I was still quite self-conscious about my written English. As I was destined to be an engineer, at least in my mind, I paid very little attention to the English classes that was required. It was yet another obstacle to be feared and survived as I made my way into engineering; that transition from special English to regular English was also a point of pride with me, as I was moving into the mainstream. Additionally,  this particular transition is also disguised by the fact that everyone else is going to a new school, where we had no history, I was going to slip in unnoticed, I hoped.

My first English teacher at Arapahoe was Rahn Anderson, an extrovert and a beloved younger teacher who had the energy to out enthuse all of us. I was an introvert, made more so by being a someone that doesn’t stand out. I tried to fly under the radar as much as possible but I was not able to escape Mr. Anderson’s eagle eyes all the time.

Mr. Anderson delighted in the practice of the impromptu, an extemporaneous essay written in class. He loved the challenge that the impromptu presented to us, I considered it a death sentence. It was during one of these impromptus that I learned the definition of the word trite. I received one of my essays back after a dreaded impromptu assignments with the word trite written over a paragraph that was circled in red.

In class, Mr. Anderson explained to us what trite meant: overused and consequently of little import while lacking originality or freshness. He further expounded on the evil of using trite and clichéd phrases. Amazingly enough, that lesson stuck with me through the rest of my life. My writing may not have improved but I have always checked myself when I read or wrote, or thought. I further extended that idea of trite to thoughts and ideas, readings, music, even to jokes and stories.

Every time I saw unoriginal phrases and ideas I avoided them, I elevated my expectations and made it my daily mission to never tell the same joke twice to the same crowd; I became much more sensitive to the words and phrases that I read as well as the words that I wrote.  I became impatient with people who told the same stories the same way all the time.

I grew to be an expert at spotting things that are trite, at least by my exacting standards, and I also became a connoisseur of the most overt offenders of my own sensitive palate for originality.  

This heightened awareness also made me delve deeper into language and thought, it made me think about how the great writers express themselves. I never made parsing sentences as habit, but I did learn to appreciate the well-turned phrase and the clever sentence structure. I reveled in all the ingenious ways that sentiments can be expressed, with originality.

Digging even further, as I became a better writer, I learned to appreciate the different forms of the English language. I came to appreciate the long form essay, the personal essay, the writings of people that I never thought I would ever read, since I was still a stereotypical engineer.

In recent years, I started to gain an appreciation for poetry. The most precise and imaginative form of writing, even though I am terrible at writing original poetry, I know what good poetry is: simple, spare, and definitely not trite.

As I move through this life, I look back on the simple and unexpected things that had moved me and shaped my thinking along the way, and that simple and unexpected lesson in trite definitely molded me in more ways than I could have imagined. 

Thanks Mr. Anderson.