By Patricia Lee Sharpe
I have been trying to think of something novel and topical to write about Thanksgiving, but all that’s happening is that I am getting more and more disgusted (and bored) by the “disfunctional family and awful friends” theme, Thanksgiving version. Its equally tedious sub-theme is the “miserably overstuffed” lament.
So stop already! If you don’t get along, don’t get together. If you hate turkey and all the rest, cook something else. If you’re full, stop eating.
As for me, I flew quite a distance to share Thanksgiving in a three generation family setting. We all pitch in and cook up a terrific dinner featuring our take on the traditional ingredients. Then we sit down and thoroughly enjoy the repast. We eat a lot more than usual because it's yummy and we feel no regrets because a feast or two a year makes none of us unhealthily fat.
I anticipated this encounter with no dread. I will look back on it with no regrets, and I am looking forward to many more enjoyable, heartwarming Thanksgivings.
The usual verbiage vis-à-vis Thanksgiving suggests that such aberrant good fortune should flood me with vastly humbling gratitude, but it’s hard for me to believe our family situation (which does indeed involve divorce-complicated holiday scheduling) is exceptional. In fact, I suspect that such agreeable family gatherings are really quite normal, but columnists would rather write about people who are sulky, angry, cruel, clueless, or puking.
The other insupportable Thanksgiving genre is the wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the maimed are made happy if not whole and the estranged are brought together, etc. Naturally, if this is your core ideal for Thanksgiving, anything like an ordinary, non-combative, non-transformative sharing of home-cooked food is going to seem pretty bland, pretty banal, utterly lacking in emotional voltage and decibels.
Getting a little more serious and looking a little beyond the purely personal, those of us who are able to eat three squares, and even more on holidays, should probably not be content with bowing our heads (or not) and expressing gratitude on Thanksgiving or any other day. We should probably ask ourselves what we are doing to make it possible for more people to ingest a decent quota of calories daily. This is a cliché, too, I suppose, but at least it takes us beyond self-pity and self-congratulation.
As for me, I vote for a party with some sense of economic justice. I support initiatives touching on human welfare. I write up a storm on related issues. I even have my financially charitable moments. But the truth is, I really don’t do that much. I should probably do better.
How about you?