Thanksgiving

Can't we all just be thankful that we don't have to see that racist uncle this year?

I wish I had thought to write a proper review for Thanksgiving earlier this week. I’ll try to do it justice while in the midst of this food coma.

Here’s the thing: I find it kind of weird when people tell me Thanksgiving is their favorite holiday. Don’t get me wrong, I love the food. I enjoy getting drunk with the other black sheep member of my family. I like having a day to mark the start of the consumer frenzy that is the Christmas season.

But I also feel strange about celebrating a holiday that’s based around a myth about white settlers and the Wampanoag Indians putting aside their differences to enjoy a meal that looks nothing like the typical meal we gorge ourselves on today. The uncomfortable reality is that the celebration of Thanksgiving is another example of what anthropologist Renato Rosaldo calls imperialist nostalgia, or our tendency to make racial domination seem…not so evil.

I would go as far as to say that the story of Thanksgiving is essentially an imperialist wet dream. It’s something we can turn to in order to make ourselves feel better about the past, about the early colonial days that influenced the formation of this nation.

The story of Thanksgiving is one of interracial harmony, which also happens to be the story of America we like to tell ourselves. We’re a melting pot that still hasn’t figured out how to deal with the evils in our past or considered how they’ve shaped our present.

The actual myth of Thanksgiving was also sort of an afterthought. This article in The New Yorker breaks it down in more detail, but the ‘day of unity and remembrance’ that Abraham Lincoln declared a holiday after the horrors of the Civil War wasn’t firmly linked to the pilgrim-Wampanoag feast until much later.

It’s understandable that Lincoln would be looking for something to unify the country at that time. After 4 years of a Trump presidency, the country, again, feels…like we went through a kind of civil war. And the fact that we’re divided on whether to take COVID-19 seriously is both sad and farcical.

#FreedomOverFear is a hashtag I’ve seen from the MAGA set, who believe that the liberal media are just doing their usual fear mongering to keep families apart this Thanksgiving. What’s even more depressing is the number of people who have still decided to travel and have their usual large holiday gatherings.

Honestly, I don’t get it. I don’t get why people are suddenly happy to spend all this quality time with their families. Each year I read article after article about dealing, née coping, with family at these annual gatherings. Seriously, why can’t we all be thankful that we’re getting a free pass on seeing unruly relatives this year?

I’ll admit that this Thanksgiving has lacked that certain holiday feeling. But being surrounded by all the usual friends and family I spend the day with wouldn’t change that, because that’s the nature of 2020. While I still have a lot to be thankful for, I’m not in a very celebratory mood, and I guess I find it odd that people even want to spend Thanksgiving like everything’s normal. Even more odd than when people tell me that Thanksgiving’s their favorite holiday.

That said, I’m not just reviewing Thanksgiving; I’m reviewing Thanksgiving during a pandemic. And I give it 2 stars.