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.
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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.