Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. While commercialism tries to infiltrate it, it remains a day of the four F’s: Feasting, Family, Friends, and Faith. I placed the feasting first because food is the central theme for the gathering of family and friends. The kitchen aromas infuse Thanksgiving Day: turkey cooking in the oven, pots on the stovetop simmering the mashed potatoes and green beans, buttered rolls rising in tin trays, and sugary pies cooling on oven racks. Thanksgiving smells will live within me until I take my last breath.
I relished Thanksgiving even more after I first left my Texas home to attend engineering school in Colorado. My parents stipulated that travel costs to-and-from school were to be paid by me. I was poor and could not afford the plane fare, so I stayed in Denver and ate the holiday meal in the homes of college friends. The food was certainly tasty, and I was kindly welcomed. Yet deep inside, I longed to be with my Texas family. Final exams started shortly after Thanksgiving which meant I spent much of the holiday studying, which dampened my holiday mood.
Upon graduation, I moved to California and still could not afford the plane fare to Texas, which meant another Thanksgiving alone. After getting married, along with the planning of a December move to Houston, was another California Thanksgiving without family. Things greatly improved in Houston with family closer. Texas Thanksgivings were occasionally held in our first home with most of my extended family present. This was interrupted one year when we were invited to the home of my brother’s girlfriend only to learn at noon on Thanksgiving Day that it was canceled due to illness. We sped to the grocery store and by 7pm, had whipped up a traditional Thanksgiving feast. This was before you could outsource complete Thanksgiving meals.
Then I was transferred to London for three years. We tried to celebrate Thanksgiving in a city where there was no related holiday. I worked per normal and we had our Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. Finding a turkey and the other American dishes proved difficult and expensive in a city that doesn’t care much about the holiday. During my second London ex-pat assignment, our church held a Thanksgiving meal for the American members and our British hosts asked me about the origins. I discovered that the British knew little about Thanksgiving except for the turkey and apple pie. They were astonished to learn about the multi-day 1621 Plymouth Colony harvest festival that celebrated surviving the first year in the New World. President Lincoln made it a national holiday in 1863 and designated it as the final Thursday in November. The civil war was raging, and Lincoln delivered the proclamation “with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience … fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation. …”
Our current Thanksgiving traditions do have capitalistic roots. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt changed the Thanksgiving date to the next to last Thursday in November to boost the economy. This was the start of Christmas shopping and created seven more Christmas shopping days. I remember the crowded malls on the Friday after Thanksgiving as many people were off work. Now, starting in October, consumers are bombarded with Christmas ads and internet deals, all trying to get people to part with their hard-earned dollars. The good news is that Thanksgiving survives intact, a day of the four F’s.
After living outside of Texas for fifteen years and not traveling on Thanksgiving, I relish this holiday even more. Its foundation is supported by two Christian theological concepts: community and gratitude. Thanksgiving food is important, but it is the gathering of loved ones that makes the holiday special. People travel near and far to embrace a loved one and feast together in community. I can easily cook the Thanksgiving food alone, but it isn’t Thanksgiving until the meal is shared. For the past two years, my father and his four children with their spouses gathered in my home the weekend before Thanksgiving for a ‘pre-Thanksgiving.’ Traditional food is served and it feels like Thanksgiving Day. My family is growing older and has its share of ailments yet love still abounds as it did when we were young.
Thanksgiving is also about gratitude. As the years go by, my sense of gratitude expands. No matter what the year brings, I still praise God for the blessings of creation, grace, love, healing, and community. I remain hopeful in a fallen world, but do not take my blessings for granted. Gratitude restrains my ego and allows me to recognize the beauty, love, self-sacrifice, and goodness that surrounds me. Even though the Plymouth Colony Pilgrims suffered many hardships, they expressed gratitude and invited others to share in their bounty.
I look forward this year to hosting Thanksgiving with my wife’s family. They travel from Dallas and Missouri to spend the long weekend together in Austin. Their ages range from two to over eighty. The TV will be playing an NFL game, and the kitchen will be the center of activity that produces the long-awaited Thanksgiving aromas. The children will have their toys scattered on the living room floor while the adults take turns entertaining them. In the chaos, there is bonding built by years of close blood relationships. When the last leaves, the house will slowly return to normal amidst the vacuum of silence. Then the anticipation begins to build again for next year’s Thanksgiving Day. May this holiday always be filled with the four F’s: Feasting, Family, Friends, and Faith. And may we always be filled with gratitude.
