We celebrate he Fourth of July by buying flags, fireworks, hot dogs and anything red, white, and blue. That’s good, right? Halloween sells costumes both ghoulish and foolish, spooky yard decorations and candy…lots of candy. Even New Year’s Eve sells gallons of champaign and lots of prime rib and party hats.
Christmas…well, Christmas, or Winter Festival or whatever you choose to call it is the big kahuna of sales.
There is that one little holiday, tucked between Halloween and Christmas, that is all about about family and warm feelings and gratitude. A holiday when we sit together over an abundance of food and express our gratitude for the friends who have enriched us, the family who embraces us and all the good things life has given us. It is a day to sit back and enjoy the laughter of children and the gentle snoring of Uncle Bert’s tryptophan-induced coma.
Insert here the sound of crickets. Where is the profit in gratitude?
“What’cha doing for Thanksgiving?”
“Same as last year, overeat, sleep in the Lazyboy, watch the ballgames.”
Leave it to big business to drain the local color out of that Norman Rockwell painting. Here’s what happened to Thanksgiving. Businesses filled the sales void by creating a new holiday with the ominous name of Black Friday. While it sounds like it should be connected with witches and goblins, Black Friday is a day solely dedicated to producing a buying frenzy. It was not a tradition without a name, it is a day created to play on our insecurities and our competitive spirit.
Black Friday uses commercials and newscasts to lure us into combat with false shortages and special deals. The day after counting our blessings is dedicated to trampling our neighbors to get to one of the last ten Talking Elmos or Playstation 5’s. People you would smile at on the street jostle and elbow each other waiting for stores to open and sometimes trample store workers as they surge toward the special deals. Nightly News always captures lots of footage of stampedes of shoppers and tries to sound appalled at such uncivil behavior. Don’t be fooled. It wasn’t those savage shoppers who created the term “Door-Buster Sale”.
And why is it called ‘Black Friday’? Not because of the bruises we suffered fighting over that 70” panoramic screen TV, no, it is to celebrate making a profit…ostensibly the day when businesses pass the break-even mark, go from loss, marked in red, to profit, marked in black. Panic buying is good business.
My father used to misquote somebody by saying, “Youth is hope, old age is cynicism.” Maybe he was right and I have become cynical. There was a tradition in my family, and, I hope, still may be in yours when the patriarch, Dad, would summon us all to the Thanksgiving table, or tables, when our family grew or friends were added. He had the power.
We were all so saturated in tradition that we put down our squabbles, endured our differences and joined hands around a bountiful meal. Despite losses and gains, changes in lives and even in the face of death or divorce, we sat down for an hour of over-indulgence, two hours of cleaning up and another hour of good-byes.
Thanksgiving didn’t heal all our rifts but it plastered over them long enough for us to remember that we were all just people trying to get by in the best way we knew how.
That power died with Mom and Dad’s generation. My sister, Connie, tells me every year that we need to have one more Thanksgiving as a family…to call all the separate lives together and be that family again. I laugh it off as impossible. There is too much division, I tell her, and it could never happen. Inside, I am not laughing. Deep under my cynicism, I wish her dream would come true. I wish we could all put aside our past heartaches and our bruised egos and for those few hours, have a Thanksgiving, not as it really was, but as we choose to remember it.
That act of selective memory is what makes hand-churned ice cream taste better than it ever really did, it makes our parents saints, our babies a constant delight and our little victories the stuff of legend. Selective memory also paints our past in dark shades of gray or in brilliant colors. We choose certain memories and discard the rest.
So what if, during some of those family Thanksgivings we cursed under our breath or smiled through the pain of loss or stepped on the feelings of someone already bruised by life? What if, instead of focusing on giving thanks for the good things we had, we nursed wounds of the heart and mourned the brevity of our time together? At that moment we were together and we were family and such days could not, would not, last forever. Through it all, we grabbed the best memories and squeezed them into the people we would become.
During those many Thanksgivings in several houses and at different tables, we shared a part of our lives, our hopes and dreams with dozens of friends and family members. We watched children grow up and have children of their own, we cheered each other’s successes and grieved over losses, we laughed and cried and ate and drank. We burned the dressing, spilled the wine, blessed the food and welcomed all who were at our table.
Whatever family you sit down with, remember they have taken you in. By birth, marriage, friendship or charity, they have chosen to be your shelter, your refuge from a world that sometimes seems indifferent. Remember too, that there are those we love who are with other families and that through them we are connected to a network of care.
For those of you who have been kind enough and loyal enough to listen to my podcast or read my blog over the past three years, I have come to think of you as my extended family and I keep writing these episodes because some of you have told me that they take you away from the everyday problems, big and small, that weigh us down. I would invite you all to dinner but turkey is expensive this year and I would need a bigger boat of gravy. Instead, following the tradition of my family, I will hold out my hands before I begin Thanksgiving dinner and imagine that we are all joined in a circle of care and fellowship and I will give thanks for you.
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