Thanksgiving, Friendship, and Corn
When I was 20, I lived in Seattle, renting a studio apartment on Capitol Hill and working an office job. I was 2,000 miles from my hometown, and so that year spent Thanksgiving there instead of with my family. My friend Renee and her boyfriend were house-sitting at her boss's house, a funky place with a piano, and eight or so of us spent the full day together there, surrounded by a generous stranger's stuff. Renee and Brian were good friends of mine at the time, and I remember their other friends, strangers to me, were there as well. Most of them were vegetarians, so we had spaghetti as the main course. We watched Saturday Night Fever and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We all had the day off from our weekday jobs and were spending it together.
That was the first time I thought of Thanksgiving as a holiday about friendship and adopted families, with Christmas and the other December holidays being for the family.
I was talking with Rose, a painter (I think), about this at a similar dinner last Thursday. And she made the same case I did, but put it in the context of Thanksgiving as this particularly American holiday, and what makes it so. The wrongs of history that followed aside, it hit me: the pilgrims were having this meal not with the people from their past (the family) but with the people who were essential to their present and future, in this place far away from their homeland, and eating these things that would have been unusual at a holiday dinner back in Europe: turkey, corn. I imagined some kid in the mid-1950s going from the Midwest to Columbia University, and staying in New York over the holiday and listening to jazz and eating food that was once exotic and now familiar in this new world. The food of the adult present, the people of the adult present; a holiday that celebrates the present day.
That was the first time I thought of Thanksgiving as a holiday about friendship and adopted families, with Christmas and the other December holidays being for the family.
I was talking with Rose, a painter (I think), about this at a similar dinner last Thursday. And she made the same case I did, but put it in the context of Thanksgiving as this particularly American holiday, and what makes it so. The wrongs of history that followed aside, it hit me: the pilgrims were having this meal not with the people from their past (the family) but with the people who were essential to their present and future, in this place far away from their homeland, and eating these things that would have been unusual at a holiday dinner back in Europe: turkey, corn. I imagined some kid in the mid-1950s going from the Midwest to Columbia University, and staying in New York over the holiday and listening to jazz and eating food that was once exotic and now familiar in this new world. The food of the adult present, the people of the adult present; a holiday that celebrates the present day.