Musings on a Problematic Holiday
Yesterday, I woke to a text from my sister asking if I maybe could make thanksgiving dinner a day early.
I guess I should back up here. Those who know me personally know Thanksgiving isn’t something I’ve really celebrated for at least three decades. If anything, it’s been one of those bizarre parts of the American National Religion that I’ve most tried to avoid, and particularly now that I live far from the United States.
I’m currently in Luxembourg, where my sister and her family (my brother-in-law and my nephews) now live. She’s here for work for a few years, living in rather amazing conditions with a rather well-compensated job in one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever visited.
Her sons are quite young, young enough to have adapted quite quickly to living in a foreign country. They’re honestly better adapted here to Luxembourg than I am to Rennes, France, which is my new home and one I’ve lived in continuously for almost two years. They’ve picked up enough of the three other languages here besides English (French, German, and Luxembourgish) that they’re comfortable speaking to other children on the playgrounds here, and are really quite happy, as are their parents.
This is the second time I’ve come here, the first being last month. Luxembourg is truly a gorgeous place as far as cities go, a fairy-tale mix of the medieval, renaissance, and modern cut through by a deep river gorge which was once held sacred by the pagans here before the Christians blocked the springs and tore down the shrines. One can walk for hours through that gorge, passing ancient trees and new skate parks in a state of constant wonder, then climb back up to find hyper-modern buildings flanked by aristocratic palaces and old artisan’s shops.
Luxembourg in winter, above the sacred gorge
The city (and really the entire Grand Duchy of Luxembourg) is a beautiful, problematic place. Those who’ve followed European politics might know that it was, until very recently, a tax haven for the rich and corporations, with secrecy laws similar to what Switzerland is still known for. You could hide your business doings and your wealth here and have your capital subject only to Luxembourg’s lax laws rather than the stricter rules of France, Germany, or elsewhere.
Though that all changed recently, it is still a haven for international (especially American) corporations which want to operate in Europe. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and many other tech companies headquarter themselves here, as do countless international banks (there’s a Chinese State Bank just down the street from me, across from a stark and heavily-surveilled synagogue). You hear a lot of American English on the street, especially during business hours, and someone I’ve talked to said they’re mostly either working for the banks or for the tech companies, rarely any other jobs.
My sister is here as one of those workers. The company she works for paid her to move here, gave her a substantial housing allowance, and subsidizes tuition for her children. As an anti-capitalist, on paper this all looks a bit problematic of course. But as her older brother, who remembers her playing barefoot in the clay pits around our rotting A-frame home in the foothills of Appalachia, waiting for the government welfare truck to deliver the only food we’d be eating that month, I can’t help but notice the deep contrast of her life now and feel a deep sense of gratitude.
In the years previous, she worked in retail management. Thanksgiving, that most problematic of American holidays, always meant she’d be working that day and the overnight, trapped as all retail workers are by that shopping slaughter-fest called “Black Friday.” One autumn when I visited she was told she needed to come in by 2pm that day, which meant she’d miss everything. I packed her a dinner of spinach lasagne and brownies and felt for a moment like the matron of a family of factory workers, making sure their time in the mills would not be too miserable.
Black Friday is deeply problematic, and so is Thanksgiving. Here in Europe there is no official Thanksgiving, and thus no Black Friday, though the retailers have certainly tried. In France you can see the shops displaying “Black Friday” sale signs. Like all American imports, the French don’t really do it “right” (for instance, an “American Sandwich” here is usually ham, mayonnaise, lettuce, and hard-boiled egg on a baguette, which is about as un-American as you can possibly get). It’s pretty clear they don’t know what they’re doing, and anyway French shoppers don’t care: they’ll shop whenever they damn please (except Sundays), and certainly aren’t going to camp overnight to do so.
Thanksgiving is of course problematic. In the United States, people buy factory-farmed over-fed turkeys, canned processed pumpkin (but not actually pumpkin—usually a mix of other orange squashes) and other industrially-produced food products. Then they make too much of it, over-cook most of it, and over-eat to sedate themselves from the pain of living and familial strife. Beyond all that, though, Thanksgiving has come to symbolize settler-colonialism, hearkening to early Puritan celebrations where indigenous people taught them to harvest food and then subsequently died of plague or murder.
The mythic origins of Thanksgiving are, like the mythic origins of all other holidays, less true and more mythic. The “first” Thanksgiving declared by the Pilgrims didn’t actually start the national holiday. That is, there was no continuous celebration from 1621 (the first harvest festival of the Pilgrims) to the present day. Nor was that actually the first such celebration: the French and Spanish had celebrated multiple thanksgiving masses in the century before.
Thanksgiving didn’t really start until the mid 19th century as a state holiday and the mythic Pilgrim origins were later woven into the celebration, similar to the way modern Christmas was constructed (Santa Claus/St. Nicholas came much later). It was instituted and set by the federal government by Abraham Lincoln, part of whose proclamation reads:
It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.
Lincoln’s proclamation reveals several oft-unnoticed aspects of the creation of Thanskgiving that are worth looking at. First off, he mentions God a lot, something which to a liberal-minded American might seem merely a throw-back to more “primitive” times of religious belief and a hold-out of American Calvinism. But proclamations of “thanksgiving,” especially with mentions of penitence, are far older than that, and hardly limited to the United States.
In Europe after wars, kings, priests, and emperors declared similar observances, whose content and purpose changed according to whether the nation had won or lost. Feasting and gratitude days, especially related to or corresponding to harvests, are much older still, stretching back throughout Christian Europe (especially after the end of the Black Plague) and into pre-Christian Europe, and were declared by empires (for instance, The Roman Empire) and oracles or priests (Christian or pagan) alike. Lughnasadh, for instance, is a feast of gratitude to the goddess Tailtiu, the mother of Lugh who gave humans agriculture, celebrated with offerings of first harvests, feasting, and athletic games.
That is, the act of showing gratitude to the divine (God or the gods or the spirits) through feasting is neither a new nor a Christian or American creation. American Thanksgiving is merely one iteration of a thing humans have done since recorded time throughout the world. Like Christmas, it’s a heavily-Christianized pagan continuation. And also like Christmas, it’s a mostly empty act, its spiritual and political content thoroughly neutered by capitalist market imperative.
Returning to Lincoln’s declaration, we see the second aspect of rites of gratitude through the matter of “penitence.” Asking the divine for collective forgiveness didn’t originate with America either: particularly after wars that went badly, the Church would suggest (or demand) and kings would declare days of national penitence.
The logic here stretches back into pagan times as well (including the pagan Canaanite and Hebraic cultures which eventually settled into Judaic monotheism). Lost wars were a sign the gods were not on the side of the people, that the gods had been offended by the people’s actions or had not received the required offerings. When the Hebrews lost wars they “purified” themselves; pagan Celtic and Germanic peoples offered more sacrifices. Christianity continued this, though often the purifications involved purging the villages of witches or Jews who might have worked against them. This follows directly from the Hebraic tradition of purging (murdering) foreigners and their idols from the land because their presence angered their jealous God.
In the medieval period and more closer to the present, collective mourning often involved the building of massive religious structures (cathedrals or statues) to do penance. The Basilica of Sacré-Cœur in Paris, for instance, was built as an act of penance both for the defeat of France during the Franco-Prussian war and also to ask forgiveness for the Paris Commune, which many Christians judged as the reason God had turned away from France.
Sacré-Cœur Basilica, a monument of penance for socialism in Paris…
Such acts were not limited only to penance, however. Monuments such as the Arc de Triomphe, the Brandenberger Tor, the Siegessäule, and many other edifices which we now look at as merely secular national monuments, were built as offerings in thanks to the divine for victory. More than a cursory glance at these various monuments shows them as obvious continuations of a civic relationship to God or the gods, thanking the divine its blessing on their military ventures. But monuments were not just built by kings and empires, but by ordinary people. Crosses, statues of the virgins or of saints, and then before Christianity statues and shrines to spirits, standing stones and other monuments were raised to honor and thank ancestors, gods, and others for personal gifts, family protection, fertility of the land, and other acts of gratitude.
Though there are no monuments built on American Thanksgiving, and though it would appear no one really does any sort of penance (but lots of regretting for an overfull stomach), we only need to scratch a bit deeper to see how the altars are still adorned and the offerings still flow. Scratch a bit deeper, yes, but also turn the page to the next day, the consumer madness that is Black Friday.
On Black Friday, Americans rush to the shrines of capitalism, kneeling in devout gratitude to the abundance the industrial gods shower upon their people. Fights erupt and people are trampled in these yearly pilgrimages, just as sometimes occurs (less frequently but more deadly) in the Islamic hajj to Mecca. And more than anything, Black Friday is the day of national renewal, so-named because supposedly it is the day big retailers finally begin to see a profit in their operations. The sales numbers on that day are auguries for the wealth of America: if enough devoted worship at the cash registers, God has favored the capitalists and they may continue to profit from the labor of the land.
And while Black Friday following Thanksgiving might seem like a happy accident for retailers, it’s intentional: Lincoln set the holiday to the last Thursday in November; later, President Roosevelt moved it to the fourth Thursday on the demand of the founder of what is now Macy’s, to allow merchants more time to sell their goods for Christmas.
With all of this, one might think it’s best just to jettison Thanksgiving as hopelessly problematic (and colonialist, despite its actual origins being not rooted in colonization but instead the civil war). In my case I don’t think so. Celebrating it is something I do because it matters to people I love, and we were able this year to celebrate it while not living on stolen, colonized land. My sister has a lot to be grateful for, as do I. I’m grateful I’m not in America anymore, and I’m grateful she and her family are, as well, and that all seemed absolutely things to thank the gods for.
Were I still back in the United States, perhaps I’d shudder at the thought of the day, its empty vapidity, its gluttonous and empty calories. I know I’d be living in anxiety of the day after, the rush of commercial Christmas music and the wailing screams of Sale! Sale! everywhere. To be honest, it’s really always been the religious fury of Black Friday that has terrified me most.
But mostly, I find myself wondering what societies might look like where our gratitude to the divine, be that gods, ancestors, or the land upon which we live, looked more like the ancient pagan celebrations of thanks rather than the national declarations of penance. Or what might happen if “penance” meant giving back stolen land and replanting forests and tearing down the factories.
Thanksgiving is an ancient rite, far older than the United States or any empire. Feasting in gratitude re-inscribes our health and well-being into the world of the gods, into the nature from which all wealth derives. In America, Thanksgiving is a pale shadow of that older way of being, unrooted from the earth and overlain with nationalist and colonialist myths. But the rite itself remains important, and many rites like it. Not for the renewal of nations and governments but for ourselves and the earth of which we are but one small part. If our feasts connected us again to the cycles of the earth in gratitude, and if our contrition took the form of caring for that earth rather than pillaging it for more products, perhaps we could finally have an unproblematic holiday.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is a druid, an autonomous marxist, a nomad, and writer. Find his blog here, or buy his books here.