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.
