Thanksgiving Good and Bad

Thanksgiving is coming, and I reflect on its history and the impact it has (however briefly) on our own daily lives.

Some of our holidays don’t make a lot of sense.

For instance, Thanksgiving comes right after Halloween. Halloween was once a pagan holiday to celebrate the harvest gathering of cut wheat, but today is celebrated by adolescents getting hyper and toilet-papering your house after ingesting little bundles of refined sugar (candy) handed out from strangers door to door in the suburbs.

See the historical connection?

Thanksgiving is among the most American of holidays next to the Fourth of July, but unlike the Fourth, involved no shooting at British men in red coats (1776). Instead, it celebrates the arrival of a group of Brits to America who were pariahs in their own country (England), and fled here.

In other words, it’s a celebration of the unplanned arrival of some undocumented immigrants. What could be more American than that?

Thanksgiving celebrates these poor bedraggled people, who staggered here without knowledge of the country, without knowledge of the growing season, or how to grow things, or anything, except their own imagined superiority. They were helped by the Indians, whom they would shortly repay by annihilating them with gunpowder and social diseases of every description to which the Europeans had built up immunities.

The poor Indians. Talk about the price of failure to do a proper credit and character check on new tenants.

The Indians and Plymouth Rock Europeans apparently gathered for a meager feast that first Thanksgiving, most of which the Indians supplied because the immigrant bozos couldn’t pay their share of the tab. The turkey, if there was a turkey served at that event, was a wild, stringy, tough-to-eat bird, totally unlike the wrapped, fat, synthetically grown, steroid-fed Arnold Schwarzenegger-like birds in modern supermarkets.

Anyway, in commemoration, we celebrate Thanksgiving today by stuffing ourselves with turkey equipped with pop-up thermometers, dressing, gravy and yams, conducted at a family gathering where we once again realize why we always hated Uncle Fred…because he’s a loudmouthed, racist, pompous, boorish idiot. He has a lot in common with the Plymouth Rock arrivals. I want to ban him to another country.

But on the whole, I like Thanksgiving, the only holiday where there’s but one rule, to make an absolute hog of yourself by cramming as much food as you can down your gullet. We’re supposed to be thankful for this abundance, and I truly am.

In fact, I’m a defender of Thanksgiving, which is an endangered species. Christmas, and the out-of-control greed promoting it, is threatening to bury Thanksgiving. Remember how in the old days, robber baron advertisers at least had the decency to wait until TEN PM Thanksgiving night to start advertising for Christmas on TV and radio.

Not anymore.

Now the ads start before Halloween.

We haven’t even had a chance to savor that Thanksgiving turkey looking all golden and steaming on the table with our mouths watering, and we already see clerks wearing stupid-looking Santa hats, and hear Christmas music on the store intercom.

I’m going to defend Thanksgiving, and the rights of those poor, disease ridden starving Europeans, and the Indians whose land they would soon steal.

I’m forming a nonprofit group, the Committee to Protect the Integrity of Thanksgiving. Email me at John@Sammonsays.com if you’re interested in becoming an activist.

Copyright 2006 Sammonsays