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.

Book Review-Make it Stick

Make It Stick-The Science of Successful Learning

By Peter C. Brown. Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel

A friend recommended that I dive into this book since I was hoping to learn about the latest theories on learning and cognition; one reason for my search is to be a better coach with volleyball athletes, but as it turns out, this book is helping me become a better college professor.

The authors devoted the opening chapter to the myths and sacred cows that we carry in our minds about how we learn and how to best create an environment that is suited for teaching.  They recount the large number of beliefs that many hold dear as the absolutely truth and then give evidence which debunks them one by one.

The central tenet for the book is stated clearly very early in the first chapter:  learning needs memory and the ability to recall from the memory; people will need to continue to learn and remember throughout our lives in order to function; and finally learning is an acquired skill, not a natural skill, one that need to be practiced.

Very early on in this book, the authors laid out their own beliefs. The first is that learning needs to be effortful in order to be effective, that is, we learn better when learning is difficult. They also believe that people tend to be poor judges when it comes to determining how well we learn a subject; we often overestimate our learning prowess. One of their biggest pet myths is that rereading and massed practices - the perennially preferred studying practice of most people - is the worst and least effective practice habit.

What do they believe in? They believe that learning comes from our ability to retrieve knowledge from our memory, and that we need to exercise that memory retrieval constantly in order to makes sure that it is always there for our recall. They believe that the exercise of retrieval and recall needs to be done with built in gaps in timing, i.e. they need to be spaced; they believe in making the repetitions be unpredictable and irregularly spaced in time, i.e. interleaved.  They believe that before being shown how to resolve a problem, the learner needs to wade into the problem without any clue as to how to solve the problem. They believe that searching for and discovering the underlying reasons for a piece of knowledge is much more important that just being able to perform a skill repetitively, although they do acknowledge the importance of being able to repeat a task procedurally.

Although the ideas and methods that is covered in this book is not all completely new to me, the presentation and organization is quite interesting. They can cite a great number of studies in the scientific literature that effectively and sufficiently support their arguments against the stated myths while citing enough studies which also amply support their arguments. The most interesting part of the book came to me after I had read it from cover to cover and was sitting down to review what I had learned. What the authors cleverly did is to use the very desired practices that they are espousing in structuring the book. They spaced the same descriptions of the desired practice repeatedly through the text, they interleaved certain arguments in all the chapters, they gave the reader time and room to discern the underlying principles, and they motivated the reader to elaborate on what they had learned to themselves, at least I did.

I am relatively certain that this was deliberate.  Indeed, I followed the rut that they had called out in their recitation of bad learning habits and strategies as I was reading, rereading, and taking massive amounts of notes in order forcefully lever the ideas into my head. Little did I know that the authors had, by the nature of how the book is structured, created an opportunity for the reader to practice what they had preached.

As I stepped through my memories of the time that I was reading this book, along with a couple of other books on how to best learn, I unintentionally spaced and interleaved my learning from this book because I was switching between books, a practice that I had picked up as a matter of habit as my learning habit throughout my life. The real question is then whether this tactic was successful: did it accomplish the goals in the way that the authors had intended? I can’t speak for the longevity memory retention of the lesson from the book, but I can say that I did spend a lot of time thinking and understanding the underlying principles. I will be able to speak to the longevity of my learning with their preferred methods when someone asks me about the book in a few years, but as of now, I had worked long and hard on learning from this book.