About Thanksgiving

[nanila]

A thing happened recently that I didn't feel comfortable addressing directly with the person involved, so it's turned into a journal post.

Someone felt the need to go on a diatribe to me about how it's a travesty that Americans continue to celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday built on what can mildly be described as false premises.

Every year I post a picture to Facebook of Wednesday Addams holding a match and delivering the following speech about Thanksgiving.

You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides. You will play golf, and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller."...And for all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.

Despite this, every year, I make an effort to celebrate Thanksgiving. Since I've had the space to do so, I've invited as many people as I can cater for to my home and fed them, at the very least, on pumpkin pie and wine. Because I also believe that despite its hugely problematic origins, the saccharine mythology of which continues to be propagated in American schools, it is possibly one of the nicest American traditions in the way it is actually practiced. I have on many occasions not been able to be with my own family on Thanksgiving, including the entirety of the last decade. Yet because of the generosity of friends, colleagues and casual acquaintances, I have never felt alone or unloved on this holiday. When most Americans hear that you haven't got anywhere to be on Thanksgiving, they will immediately invite you to their own celebration, even if they don't know you well, and the invitation will be sincere. You don't have to take it if you don't want to. But the option is always there - to be fed a nice meal, in company of people in good spirits, which in my world is one of the best things you can ever do for others.

I know the origin stories of America, especially as taught to young Americans, are full of inconsistencies and glaring omissions. I know that Americans have, to put it mildly, not always behaved well as colonists. If I were to get romantic about it, I could argue that I embody the conflict between colonial and colonised interests from the cultural right down to the genetic level, given my parents' national and racial origins.

I also know that in choosing to become British, I have taken on the mantle of possibly the most notorious of the modern colonialist oppressors. And I know that in choosing to emigrate permanently, I have given up on participation in a large portion of the culture I was brought up in. I spend 99% of my time immersed in British culture. My partner is British. My children will grow up predominantly British.

So. I get angry when someone feels the need to tell me that, of the 1% of my time that I choose deliberately to celebrate something that is American, I shouldn't be doing it. Perhaps, O White English Person, the next time you feel the need to dress someone down for clinging to a tiny portion of the culture in which they grew up, you should consider that you are possibly not the most appropriate mouthpiece of justice.

Comments

[soliano]

Well, there are many origins for Thanksgiving. We harken back to the Pilgrims who, were of course, fleeing British persecution, but it has also simply been celebrated as a holiday to give thanks for what has been given us. Of course it can't be American without having to market and merchandise it and clothe it in all sorts of mythology. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, until 1776, we were British, with all the worts that came with that. We simply continued in what we had learned, unhindered by Parliament and left to our own devices to create new horrors.

I would add that there were feasts of thanksgiving in what is now the Continental United States long before the Jamestown colonists came onshore. The Spanish celebrated those, but they did not have the press and were probably more subsumed into Catholic Holy days. Strict Protestants having so few holy days, could put more focus on one specific event. As you pointed out, the indigenous populations had nothing to be thankful about.

I would simply respond that there has been bad behavior by all the colonial powers and that, in its' modern incarnation, it is more a time to celebrate family, the blessings of the last year and how fortunate you all are to have each other and to be able to spend time together.

[yvi]

I was under the impression that even though the modern tradition might have to do with colonization, and there should be an awareness for that, Thanksgiving goes back a lot longer than that - many countries and cultures have such a holiday. Germany for example has Erntedankfest (literally "harvest thank") which is in October and, while it isn't celebrated as wildly, but has the same roots.

[yvi]

And this was supposed to be a separate comment...

[soliano]

I certainly would not disagree with that. I don't think anyone has ever said the Pilgrims came up with the idea. We just point the publicity machine to them. Kind of like Columbus Day which was added because of Catholic lobbying. The tradition of a harvest feast goes back a long way. But I took Nanila's post to refer to the specific Yank version (Canada has one too, in October I believe). I know if I were in her situation, I would find that a nice holiday to celebrate with my non-American family. Of course if I was married to a Canadian, we would fight over the date for the celebration and whether Poutine would be served.

[sfred]

Yes - harvest festival is not a uniquely American phenomenon!

[major_clanger]

I'm really sorry this has happened to you. I'm afraid that there is a noticeable tendency of some people in the UK to pick on the USA as an acceptable target for at the very least condescension and at worst outright bigotry. On more than one occasion I've been with one or other American friend when someone has made a breathtakingly offensive generalisation about the USA, only to say to to the friend in question "Oh, I forgot you were American", as if that excuses it.

I've never had the privilege of being invited to a proper Thanksgiving, nor been in the USA at the relevant time. But as it happens some of our friends regularly hold a party in late November that has a Thanksgiving theme, not in any way out of mockery but because we enjoy the opportunity to cook and share traditional American food. (I got my friend from Boston to give me her mother's recipe for Apple Pie, and since E's mother is a fully-qualified member of the DAR I assume that this would indeed be the proverbial Apple Pie That Things Are As American as.)

Again, I am so sorry this has happened and feel quite embarrassed about it. We must treat you to some hospitality at some point soon to make up for it.

[cosmolinguist]

only to say to to the friend in question "Oh, I forgot you were American", as if that excuses it.

Some of them seem to think that it's not just an excuse but a compliment. "Your Americanism is not so egregious that I have to remember it. Well done for blending in with us proper people." It's like when a woman in a mostly-male environment bristles at things like the group being addressed as "Gentlemen," and gets some justification like "I just think of you as one of the guys." Sometimes the all-too-clear message is that the best we can hope for is not to be too obtrusively what we are.

[cosmolinguist]

In previous years I've been left slack-jawed at how much anti-American sentiment people feel fine about hurling at me on the subject of/around the time of Thanksgiving. I remember one particularly vile tweet being one of the last straws that got me off of Twitter for good.

I do think most British people -- and probably even most Americans -- don't think about how much change and compromise and accommodation is required even for someone from a country so similar to move here and make a life here.

That the stereotypical-British conception of America is as an irrevocable inferior doesn't help: I'm often left with the impression that I should be glad I'm privileged with the opportunity to renounce my Americanness and replace it with good proper Britishism. To cling on to the inferior choice when I have the option of banishing it from my life seems to strike a lot of people as baffling, silly, or a sign that I really am inferior because I don't recognize the superiority of Britain in all things.

Thank you for writing this. It's really hard for me to untangle all this stuff in my head (Thanksgiving is, to put it mildly, fraught and complicated for reasons specific to me, so it's hard to tease out the generalities) and it helps so much that you share your thoughts on subjects like this.

[davidgillon]

I think there's a real underestimation of how different we are, because people are misled by the common language thing. I've worked extensively with (both remotely via telecons and sharing the next desk to) both Americans and Europeans, and I'm absolutely convinced that, in general, Brits are culturally/psychologically/politically closer to Europeans than Americans.

But people expect Americans to be just Brits with a funny accent, and when that turns out not to be the case, judgements can be harsher than needed. (And, of course, that also applies vice versa).

[cosmolinguist]

I do think Britain is more like Europe, though I think politically since Thatcher, at least, and culturally since the internet made it easier to get U.S. films and TV shows at the same time that people in the U.S. did (and vice versa, to the extent of Doctor Who and Sherlock at least) and share a culture of talking about these things, that has been becoming less true. With the rise of xenophobia and anti-European sentiment that UKIP have been riding, Britain's willingness to follow the U.S. into inadvisable wars when (almost) no one else will, and an increasing stigma against people on any kind of benefits even as those who need them struggle more and more just to survive, I do see the UK reminding me more of the U.S. all the time. But even people quite happy to talk obsessively at me about Game of Thrones or how exciting it is that "red cups" are in Starbucks again also tell me that America's crap and American things are crap and as an American I should be ashamed...not quite in so many words, usually (though sometimes it is!). The cognitive dissonance can be tiring to deal with.

[davidgillon]

Unfortunately the rise of xenophobia thing is pretty much Europe-wide, so I don't think that's really a shift towards the US, more a consequence of the ongoing depression. The anti-Europe thing is just xenophobia on a different scale, some of UKIP's partner parties are even worse on the subject.

The military intervention thing is pretty much proceeding along historical lines IMO, Britain and France have a history of intervening in Africa and Asia due to colonial history and ties that's actually gone on fairly consistently since the end of WWII, the other NATO nations have been responding in accordance with how tightly they're bound to NATO aims (the Poles for instance) and local circumstances/politics (which is why the Germans keep swinging from one pole to the other). The interesting change for me is Sweden, which has gone from absolute neutrality to a more typical European position, without shifting any closer to the US.

(rant warning)

There actually is clear evidence that the shift on benefits was triggered by the US insurer Unum, which nobbled the Labour Party back in the late 90s into backing its ideas (which are mostly based around right-wing American sociologist Talcott Parson's concept of the 'socially deviant' 'sick role', and which in the States led to it losing a humongous class action for running 'disability denial mills' and the New York State DA branding it 'an outlaw company'), eventually resulting in the catastrophe that is Atos and the WCA. Notably Unum funded a professorship for DWP's chielf medical offier, which churns out papers backing Unum's idea that disabled people are just lazy, while Unum's chief medical officer in the UK jumped ship to Atos, and has now jumped ship again to Maximus, the US company that's taking over the Atos role on the basis of bidding to do it for £50m a year less than the only other company that was willing to bid. Because what can possibly go wrong when you hand a fundamentally flawed programme, with a record for abusing the most vulnerable people, to a US company with a record of abusing disabled people, on a low-ball bid. And to cap all that, we now find that Disability Rights-UK, supposedly an umbrella group for UK disability charities, is taking Unum money to participate in a scheme to show that everyone buying Unum's disability insurance (the one they wouldn't pay out on in the first place) would fix everything *headdesk*

(/end rant)

[nanila]

I think there's a real underestimation of how different we are, because people are misled by the common language thing.

This tallies with my own experience as well. And even the common language isn't quite as common as it first appears. If I ever slip up and use American terminology for something (gas instead of petrol, kleenex instead of tissue, shift instead of change gears) I can pretty much guarantee that someone will feel the need to point it out.

I don't have quite as much experience of the European POV on Americans v Brits, but that summer school I attended in July made me realise that when many Europeans assume you're a Brit because they can't parse your accent properly, they will happily badmouth Americans to you for hours.

[davidgillon]

Winces!

I'm far from innocent in criticizing US policies, but there's a difference between that and critizing Americans en-masse. Some individual Americans, definitely, and some groups (Koch brothers and climate-change deniers I'm looking at you!), but not Americans in general and you just don't corner any random English speaker to rant at them!

[crystalpyramid]

That Addams Family clip is seriously the best. Thank you for reminding me about it!

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite American holiday, because it means spending time with my family and my friends making food together, and then enjoying a meal together. Christmas has a lot of the same customs (and at least in my mom's rendition, the exact same menu), but Christmas is always tangled up in religion and capitalism, in a way that Thanksgiving has never been for me.

Thanksgiving is so very American, with its messy racially fraught history and everyone's thoughtful analysis and warm family memories mixed up together. I feel like almost everything that's American is like that on some level. We're a messy mongrel culture with all the baggage and issues that come from that. And we're working on them. Hopefully. Sometimes slowly and painfully. That feels very American too.

I still can't quite wrap my brain around the fact that in most of the other countries in the world, people get to feel entitled to their countries because their families have lived in them forever. How does that even work? And yes, we have horrible racism, but at least we know we have horrible racism and we're working on it, not like countries where people think they don't, but actually it's just because everyone there is the same. And maybe we stole this country and we don't belong here but at least it's fair and we all don't belong here together. And now we are going to eat pie, because pie is awesome.

Seriously, pie.

[sfred]

*nods at all of this*

Given that we have just had a British festival centred around burning an effigy of someone who may or may not have been framed for terrorism in a culture of massive anti-Catholic sentiment, I think we-collectively-the-British can fuck off with the superiority thing.
I would like harvest festival celebrations to be bigger here (they were when/where I was little, but not to the extent of either North American Thanksgiving).

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, I remember trying to explain bonfire night to my dad one year, and he said "They celebrate a terrorist?!" He sounded really worried.

[davidgillon]

That reminds me of the fab article Laurie Penny just wrote on Bonfire Night, though admittedly the Bonfire Night celebrations in her home town of Lewes are deeply problematical So they burned Alex Salmond in my hometown

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, as it is celebrated, Bonfire Night is way more violent and bigoted and weird than Thanksgiving. Yes, Thanksgiving arises from an unforgivably racist and colonialist myth. But even when my kindergarten class (I don't remember interacting consciously with the mythology around Thanksgiving after that) dressed up as "Pilgrims and Indians," it just meant making two different kinds of historically-inaccurate paper hats. It didn't involve setting people on fire (even paper people!) or chanting racist or sectarian things.

I soon learned about the nasty things underpinning Thanksgiving, but all that happens is most people eat and sleep their way into the beginning of a long weekend in the company of relatives. We don't do anything more nasty or unpleasant than bicker or bite our tongues when someone brings up recent election results.

It's a little unsettling to me how... participatory the weirdnesses of Bonfire Night can be: someone has to make all those effigies of popes and politicians, people have to carry them around, and everyone seems to see it as license to burn things and set off fireworks in their backyards whether they know what they're doing or not.

[davidgillon]

I think most people tune out the dubious background noice of our anti-Catholic past - certainly as a Catholic I'll ignore it enough to let myself enjoy it, ultimately I'm just a sucker for firework displays, the brighter and sparklier the better! (Though I do approve of the school in York - IIRC - that refuses to participate as 'we don't burn old boys').

Thankfully Guys seem to be increasingly rarer, certainly in comparison to when I was a kid in the 70s when every bonfire had to have one - that's actually a reason to be grateful for the importation of US-style Halloween trick-or-treating as it handily prempts 'penny for the Guy' by less than a week. But the Lewes 'celebrations', which thankfully seem to be a one-off in their open bigotry, I find deeply problematical.

And, yes indeed, any criticism of Thanksgiving generalities can certainly be fairly answered by holding up a mirror to Bonfire Night and what lies beneath the surface there.

[cosmolinguist]

I think most people tune out the dubious background noice of our anti-Catholic past

Of course they do. Even to the extent that I'm sure many of them aren't consciously aware of it at all. (I know one of my lovely but not overly thoughtful sisters-in-law initially was surprise when I told her America doesn't have Bonfire Night. Of course she realized as soon as I started explaining why, but it was clear that in her mind Bonfire Night is just One of Those Things That There Should Be, and I'm sure a lot of British people feel that way, and have never examined that feeling, as she hadn't until she met me.) This just makes it extra frustrating when they won't allow me that same kind of "enjoy the good bits independently of the dodgy ones" stance towards Thanksgiving or other complex American things.

[davidgillon]

This just makes it extra frustrating when they won't allow me that same kind of "enjoy the good bits independently of the dodgy ones" stance towards Thanksgiving or other complex American things.

I'll admit I'm having to think about this one and my own attitudes now the comparison has been drawn. Maybe we all</> need to think more deeply about the hidden negatives in our cultural baggage, while trying to preserve the positives.

[cosmolinguist]

That's really good of you to say! Usually this is the point, when I've had this conversation with people, where they're likely to get defensive: "Yeah, but that's different, because my one is what I'm used to and yours is weird and I don't get it because I'm not used to it!" And, as I said, this is when the anti-American sentiments come out, as if I'm personally responsible for and in agreement with everything America's ever done (or that they think America has done, due to their extensive knowledge of Friends and a holiday they went on to Disneyworld). This is one time I most resent my willingness/compulsion to be conciliatory, because I'll say "yeah we all have crazy traditions and fucked up things in our culture's histories..." only to be met more often than not with "See, even you know you're wrong!" taking my attempt at bridging a shared experience as a concession, and not budging an inch themselves.

And you're totally right, we would all benefit from considering the unintended or hidden drawbacks and bigotries of our cultural assumptions and habits. I've become so aware of this since I emigrated that it's sometimes exhausting to think about, and I think I'm a lot better at being sensitive to these things (too sensitive, some of my friends would say!) than I was when I was growing up in a rural white Midwestern monoculture, but I still have to work at being mindful of this, too.

[davidgillon]

That's really good of you to say!

Doesn't mean I didn't try to say it the other way first, but I can take a hint when three tries come out wrong...

[sorrillia]

Huh; I didn't realize that people burned current politicians in effigy for Bonfire Night. Or that they still burned popes, though I knew that happened as late as the American Revolution. Apparently there was some awkwardness after French troops joined the Continental Army because the American soldiers were still burning the pope in effigy for Bonfire Night despite General Washington ordering them not to both because it would offend their allies and because it was rather ironic in their circumstances to celebrate the holiday at all.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm certain I heard about Manchester students burning Nick Clegg in effigy as a protest against tuition fees, a couple of years ago. I've definitely heard about other current politicians/living people getting this kind of treatment.

[davidgillon]

I did come up with a proposal for reforming Bonfire Night into something with more contemporary relevance earlier this year: Margaret Thatcher Night: A Modest Proposal :)

[ceb]

I am confused. I thought Thankgiving was a standard issue harvest festival, subtype: large dinner. Does it have baggage, or is the hassle because it's an American thing? (NB I know it's not just an American thing)

[adrian_turtle]

The myth of Thanksgiving is really a different thing from American history. It's almost completely disconnected. The myth is beautiful--I can see why people want to believe it.

Once upon a time, our ancestors were persecuted for their religion in their homeland, so they fled to a place where they could worship freely. The journey was difficult, and they didn't know what they would find. Many of them died on the way, but they were faithful and persevered. Our ancestors did not know how to survive in the new land where everything was strange to them, and they nearly starved. They met strange people, who became their friends, and taught them how to live in the new place. And so they all celebrated together.

It's a lovely fantasy, or national origin myth, or bit of wishful thinking, or whatever you want to call it. (A lot of people buy into the "our ancestors" idea, knowing their ancestors came to the country far more recently. Myths are like that.) You can believe it, or want to believe it, and still recognize the atrocities that came later--the biological warfare, the mass murders, the trail of tears, the residential schools.

I'm not sure if it even matters that the beginning of the myth is false as well. (The Puritans were welcome to practice their religion where they were. They wanted to leave so they wouldn't have to live among non-Puritan neighbors.) People celebrate Christmas without particularly caring whether Jesus of Nazareth was born as the stories say.

[ceb]

Thank you for the explanation. I feel much enlightened!

[crystalpyramid]

Can you please direct me to some sources that will elaborate on your claim that "the Puritans were welcome to practice their religion where they were"? That's something I've never heard, and it's not a claim that comes up supported by a brief Google search. I'm not at all surprised if there are more problems with our national myths than I know about, but I'd like to know about them.

[adrian_turtle]

There were religious restrictions on Puritans and other nonconformists in England when James I was king. That's why so many of them went to the Netherlands. The settlers who went out to Plymouth Colony went from the Netherlands--not England. William Bradford (who became governor of the colony) wrote in History of Plimouth Plantation that they needed to leave the Netherlands because they were worried their children weren't growing up to be good Puritans, being surrounded by non-Puritan neighbors.

I had been mixing up some details of the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter (which was very much a profit-making enterprise, with a lot of royal support) with the Plymouth colony of a few years earlier.

[silveradept]

As a harvest festival where everyone gathers to celebrate the crops having grown enough for people to survive the winter, yeah, and as a consequential celebration of shared meals, Thanksgiving is pretty good. It's the hagiographic story that sticks in the teeth.

[calissa]

Running super low on spoons right now, so I might have to come back later. I just wanted to say that I'm sorry you face this sort of rubbish. As culturally significant holidays go, I think Thanksgiving has it over Australia Day, which doesn't even manage to have the positive connotations of the former.

[sorrillia]

Additionally, there's some argument that the actual roots of the American tradition of Thanksgiving come from the abolitionist movement, especially since I believe it was first declared nationally by Lincoln during the Civil War, though New England states had declared celebrations of it locally before and Southern states had complained that it was just an excuse for preachers to complain about slavery.

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/11/thanksgiving-holiday-abolitionists

[lark_ascends]

*hugs you hard*