I’ve been trying to write a post about Thanksgiving for literally a week: writing, deleting, rewriting, editing, and deleting again. GhostGirl and I are twins separated at birth with the unthankfulness issue this Thanksgiving. Why do I feel so unthankful on this particular day? I like feasts. I like families. Thankfulness (or gratitude) is part of my daily meditation practice, so I shouldn’t be appalled for a day dedicated to it. And I really like pie.

Why the weirdness and uncomfortability around Thanksgiving? How freakish am I to want to throw pie rather than eat it? I’ve narrowed it down:

• being a vegetarian makes me less likely to appreciate a meal around a carcass (I feel pretty much squeamish throughout the meal, and, yes, I’ve heard of Tofurkey, and it’s gray. Yes, gray. As in gray fake meat. Who wants to eat that?); and
• having a miscarriage six weeks ago to the blessed day of Thanksgiving makes me less willing to celebrate the notion of family as we have been repeatedly unable to grow ours (in fact, I’d say that seeing other people’s babies makes me feel like I’m being repeatedly slapped, which clearly I’m not, but that’s how it feels and it’s a normal post-miscarriage feeling and no one’s fault); and, moreover,
• Thanksgiving seems to dwell in a strange land of ahistoricity.

What does that mean to dwell in ahistoricity? It means Thanksgiving seems not bound or concerned by history, and, to a certain degree, by truth.

I feel like all year I hear stories of dysfunction and familial abuse from people near and far, and then on Thanksgiving, the same storytellers sit down and share a meal with these people. It’s like they develop some sort of familial amnesia, a sense that this day occurs outside of their own personal history rather than within it. Jim thinks it’s essentially a day for a cease-fire, but it feels like more than that to me. It feels downright ahistorical.

This amnesia also occurs a greater cultural level. Why are we celebrating a meal that essentially began five hundred years of genocide? Yes, the Pilgrims were grateful that the Indians taught them to fish and grow corn. And, no, none of my close genetic relatives were involved in the genocide that followed, so what I’m feeling isn’t so much guilt as disbelief that we recreate this feast. (Robert Jensen in Why We Shouldn’t Celebrate Thanksgiving has much more on this before you try to say that the holiday has been repurposed into a general celebration of family and gratitude. Just don’t go there without reading Jensen and the United American Indians on the holiday). And probably because we lived on a reservation, and taught at an Indian school, and worked for Eight Northern Indian Pueblos, I feel that I’ve seen that genocide up close, and the entire Pilgrim-Indian feast just feels grossly ahistorical. 

It’s a very strange holiday for me, and I’m very thankful in general, but this year on Thanksgiving, it wasn’t thankfulness that I felt. I keep returning to the psalms (thanksgiving, laments, hymns, wisdom), and thinking this should really be a holiday with a lament (at least for me) rather than thanksgiving. And that a lament is just as much a prayer as a prayer of thanksgiving.