THANKSGIVING--The Way it Wasn't
(A big part of my job as communications manager for Oaktree Capital Corp is putting out monthly letters to clients, prospects, and connections. Some are stock letters from a marketing firm, some are edited from financial articles and other sources by Robert S. Jackson, the financial advisor who is my employer. And some I compose myself to go out over Mr. Jackson’s signature. I do a lot of the “feel good” and holiday letters. This was our Thanksgiving letter this year. As we prepare to “celebrate” the holiday amid bleak prospects, I thought it might be well to share the letter here as well.)
Maybe it’s the memory of all those pictures of apple cheeked Pilgrims in neat suites with shiny buckles on their shoes and hats, the prim women in white bonnets and aprons, the smiling Indians arriving with deer and other game to add to the groaning plank and trestle tables set up under a glory of New England foliage. The enduring Thanksgiving myth implanted in us since childhood makes us believe that the holiday is a celebration of abundance.
It’s easy to be thankful in good times. But is that what the holiday is really about?
The reality of that famous First Thanksgiving was far different from the pleasant pictures of our childhood. The passengers of the Mayflower, a band of religious dissenters and their hired help, had meant to land in balmy Virginia. Instead they were thrown up on the very inhospitable shores of what is now New England on the edge of a brutal winter. By the following March more than half of them were dead from starvation, exposure, and diseases ranging from scurvy to dysentery. They were cut off from relief from their friends and relatives in England and in Leyden, Holland.
Over the next summer, with some famous horticultural advice from the local natives, the colonists were able to plant a crop of New World corn and squash and Old World root vegetables. Attempts to grow wheat and barley largely failed. And by mingling with the natives, each community was exposed to alien germs. More died in both camps.
When the survivors, by now a ragged and pathetic remnant, decided to hold a harvest festival, it was largely to consume those food items that could not be safely stored for the coming winter-a winter many thought that they would never survive. The natives probably invited themselves to the despair of every goodwife counting the meager larder.
So that legendary First Thanksgiving was not a celebration of abundance or an occasion for gluttony. Rather it was a surrender to something Greater in a time of want and suffering. It was an acknowledgement by the settlers that their fate was not in their own hands.
It is no wonder that we seldom hear the story told this way. Americans don’t like to be told that we don’t have everything under control. We are willing to celebrate abundance, but are terrified-and largely unfamiliar-with want.
When we gather at our tables this year, most of us will still be in abundance. The table will be generous, the family warm and well clad. But maybe for the first time in our lives, it won’t feel like we are blessed. Many of us have lost or fear for our jobs. Our carefully built nest-eggs have shrunk. Our very homes may be in jeopardy. The news every day is filled with woe and more woe.
We are each of us, even the poorest, a thousand times more fortunate that those old Pilgrims. But we can learn from them in adversity. There is really an awful lot to be thankful for.