Belated Thanksgiving Thoughts
I never gave you guys fun Thanksgiving facts! It's OK, the Pilgrims have not changed. They still did not wear buckled hats or shoes (those came in style later). And they still maintained the longest initial peace with Native Americans of all the European settlements (about 50 years!).
And they still didn't celebrate annual "Thanksgivings", because a Thanksgiving, like a Fast/Humiliation, was a declared day in reaction to current events. And you'd be thankful too if you had survived a winter that killed half your company and your fears of the Natives were assuaged by their show of peace (because nothing says "peace" like bringing 90 warriors to eat your food and test who has the better weaponry! woo!).
And the holiday is still not a mark of "cultural imperialism" so much as a mark of how awesome Massachusetts is, and how Lincoln then declared it a national holiday in the middle of the Civil War and the South didn't even really celebrate it until FDR-- so maybe, yes, cultural imperialism, but North vs South more than anything else.
All in all, I think it's a really great holiday. I read something that said it was bad because it says "huzzah status quo" but that's not what being thankful is about. It's about appreciating what you do have that you don't deserve, or that other people do not, and counting your blessings, and submitting yourself in humility to try to be more deserving of the good things you do have. It's saying, hooray for surviving another year-- and wow, look at this life I have, now I feel obliged to be a little better, accordingly. That and as a national holiday, it is vaguely religious, in that you kind of need someone to thank (though not necessarily), but it is open to people of all faiths and interfaith celebrations, which is a wonderful holiday that can be oh-so-American and yet easily adapted by new groups without compromising their identities or shunning them as un-American.
Unless you don't like pumpkin pie. Then you should probably be deported.
And they still didn't celebrate annual "Thanksgivings", because a Thanksgiving, like a Fast/Humiliation, was a declared day in reaction to current events. And you'd be thankful too if you had survived a winter that killed half your company and your fears of the Natives were assuaged by their show of peace (because nothing says "peace" like bringing 90 warriors to eat your food and test who has the better weaponry! woo!).
And the holiday is still not a mark of "cultural imperialism" so much as a mark of how awesome Massachusetts is, and how Lincoln then declared it a national holiday in the middle of the Civil War and the South didn't even really celebrate it until FDR-- so maybe, yes, cultural imperialism, but North vs South more than anything else.
All in all, I think it's a really great holiday. I read something that said it was bad because it says "huzzah status quo" but that's not what being thankful is about. It's about appreciating what you do have that you don't deserve, or that other people do not, and counting your blessings, and submitting yourself in humility to try to be more deserving of the good things you do have. It's saying, hooray for surviving another year-- and wow, look at this life I have, now I feel obliged to be a little better, accordingly. That and as a national holiday, it is vaguely religious, in that you kind of need someone to thank (though not necessarily), but it is open to people of all faiths and interfaith celebrations, which is a wonderful holiday that can be oh-so-American and yet easily adapted by new groups without compromising their identities or shunning them as un-American.
Unless you don't like pumpkin pie. Then you should probably be deported.