Thanksgiving

This has been our fourth Thanksgiving in America. We’ve joined in a little more each year, and I’ve come to like the holiday. But it’s not my own, nor will it ever be. It’s a good example of how knowledge, and the way it intertwines with experience, is so much more complicated than we give it credit for.

My children know the history that the Thanksgiving tradition stems from, because our first Thanksgiving here, I bought them each a book, and read to them about it. But there it is, right there. It’s so different for them. Their American friends won’t have the stories read to them out of books. They’ll be told them by their American moms, digging around in the memories of their own American childhoods, and wrapping the tales with the warmth and significance that comes from the feeling of passing something on to the next generation. "This is our narrative. This is who we are." That’s what the stories say.

My family can enjoy a turkey dinner, but we don’t have the traditions. We don’t have decorations and special dishes, brought out and dusted off year after year. We don’t serve up unpalatable green bean casserole which nobody likes, but which has to be eaten because it is made from the recipe written in the book in Great-Grandma’s spidery hand-writing. We can’t reminisce about the time our parents made us dress up as pilgrims, or reflect on how the holiday has become so much more commercial than it used to be.

We can understand Thanksgiving from the books, and from watching how others go about the celebration. But that understanding is head knowledge, not knowledge in the marrow of our bones. It’s the wrong kind of knowledge for a holiday celebration.

At first I resented Thanksgiving. My birthday is 24th November, and 9-yo’s is the 28th. The last thing I needed was a whopping great public holiday plonked on top of the last week of November. I’ve always tried to be protective of 9-yo’s birthday, because as a child, I hated having a birthday close to Christmas (though come on, people, it’s a full month before... The logic must be that 1 in 12 of the population is in a similar or worse predicament, not to mention the January birthday folk.) So I saw Thanksgiving as an unwelcome interloper. Not only Christmas to contend with in birthday rivalry, but now Thanksgiving too.

With the passage of time, though, I have come to enjoy Thanksgiving. I can’t embrace it in all its glory, with pilgrims and natives helping each other through the year by planting corn, shooting turkeys and waving two fingers at England, but I do like the whole thankfulness theme. I’ve learned about one or two family traditions which I’m going to adopt, to encourage the children to reflect on what they have in their lives to be thankful for. I think that’s a good thing to add to our yearly calendar. I suppose it’s the role that Harvest Festival plays in Britain.

As for me, well, I’m jolly thankful for the opportunity to be spending this Thanksgiving in the mountains of Colorado, for the second year running. You can’t beat mountains. I could list a whole heap of things I'm thankful for, but that would be bordering on the cheesy, and I'm feeling the need for a restoration of ironic equilibrium after my last post. So I won't do that. Instead I'll focus on what I’m not thankful for, and what I'm not thankful for is that the laptop crashed as I was writing this post first time round, and the whole thing disappeared. It hasn’t come out nearly as well second time round. Wah.