Well-come

The speedbump on the road to the year’s greatest commercial bonanza, Thanksgiving is a weird holiday. Gratitude simply isn’t sexy enough to sell. That leaves feasting and family. The stores put out their piles of the same annual foodstuffs, and we gas up the tank and hit the roads (or, this year, the broadband). For a long time, I have struggled to figure out what to do with the day besides stress over turkeys that took too long and came out too dry and green beans gone cold in the meantime. (Full disclosure, I am not a foodie, and the kitchen is not my favorite room in the house.)

We’re also saddled with the grade-school Pilgrim and Indian mythology my girls would bring home in their black-and-white construction paper hats, or, worse, feather headbands, and poems about cultural exchange and the utopia of sharing a meal. I didn’t have the stomach to tell kindergartners that if Native Americans and First Peoples threw out the welcome mat for Europeans, their generosity was repaid in massacre. There’s your gratitude. The heart of the myth is in the right place in terms of hospitality, but it commits atrocities against history and the many peoples who were grievously abused by the quest for a utopia that didn’t, and still largely doesn’t, include them.

The schools do a little better now with a corrective that starts in about fifth grade, and I hope I have, too, in addressing that history with them, but the national narrative doesn’t quite know what to do with itself besides avert its eyes and whistle tunelessly past lips conveniently stuffed with turkey and yams. Perhaps our greatest nod to guilt is precisely in the way capitalism gives Thanksgiving something of a pass. And we collude by sticking our heads in the sand to welcome family, yes, but rarely the stranger who really needs to come in out of the cold (in all sorts of ways, literal and figurative), except in the form, perhaps, of a few cans of cranberry sauce donated to the local soup kitchen. I’ve been no exception here.

We call the day Thanks-giving. We can always use more opportunities to cultivate gratitude, so it’s marvelous to have a day to pause and reflect on our many blessings. A few years ago, I started a tradition with the girls where we take turns during the Thanksgiving meal saying what we’re thankful for while lighting a candle. By the end of the meal, the table is ringed with bright flames. I like that it gives a little ceremony and concrete reality to recognizing what we’ve been gifted during the year by others in our lives. Gratitude, check!

But ultimately, this is solipsistic and insular. We turn in on ourselves to count our blessings and to be with our family. What about hospitality, that supposed catalyst of the holiday? It was a cornerstone of civilization for the ancient Greeks, since any stranger at the doorstep could be Zeus in disguise. Therefore, the stranger held near-divine status (Homer’s Odyssey is really just a catalog of various tests of hospitality). I’m late to the drawing board this year for the day itself, but I take it as my challenge. In the year to come, how can I better welcome the stranger to the feast?