Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. One big plus is that there is no commercially driven gift giving; I mean the kind of obligatory gift giving that so dominates the Christmas holiday. It’s hard to underestimate that benefit. Just think about all the shopping you don’t have to do, all the credit card bills you don’t pile up and all the gifts you don’t have to exchange.
Naturally, without gift giving you won’t have to tell all those little white lies like, “Oh, Auntie Mae, a purple quilted smoking jacket with the orange shag rug collar; just what I always wanted.” Neither will you have to wrap all the gifts you’re not going to give nor write thank you cards for all the gifts you’re not going to receive; that makes Thanksgiving a winner.
The second good thing about Thanksgiving is that it always comes on a Thursday. Thursday is the perfect day of the week to have a holiday because after a Thursday holiday it makes no sense to go to work on Friday. That thinking usually generates a four-day weekend. Four-day weekends have something that three-day weekends will never have – an extra day off. When I was working, I loved four-day weekends. Now, when I’m asked what it’s like to be retired, I just say that being retired is like having four-day weekends all the time.
Floating holidays always confuse me. Sometimes they fall on a Sunday and move to Monday (does Saturday move to Friday?). Too many possibilities can drive your computer’s appointment calendar crazy. Computers, like humans, work better when the rules are simple – if it’s the fourth Thursday in November – it’s Thanksgiving; that’s as easy to remember as pumpkin pie (I hope my wife gets the hint).
The most agreeable thing about Thanksgiving by far is that it is a unifying holiday for friends, family, community and nation. It’s a feel-good celebration that has been willingly embraced by generations of native born and immigrant Americans even though the overwhelming majority of them had nothing whatsoever to do with Plymouth Rock or the Pilgrims, who set the stage by celebrating their colony’s bountiful harvest in 1621. It’s also the one time of year stories acknowledge that our history might have been very different if it were not for the help we received from America’s native peoples.
Faith has always been an important, but not mandatory, part of Thanksgiving. That was reflected in President George Washington’s first Thanksgiving Proclamation and extended to Abraham Lincoln who, in 1863, declared Thanksgiving a national holiday so “the gracious gifts of the Most High God … be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people.” Even so, few people see Thanksgiving as a truly “religious” holiday; therefore, it has been free of much of the lawsuit-bred rancor that they generate. The lawyers seem to take Thanksgiving off; that alone is worthy of thanks.
Most importantly for me and for many others, Thanksgiving has become an uplifting holiday. Perhaps those feelings are driven by the memories and love for family and friends, perhaps it’s by the realization that we are so very fortunate to live in a country of such enormous wealth and freedom. For all its problems, problems we pick at until they bleed, America is the best place to be and now is the best time to be here; that’s not chauvinism or hollow flag-waving, it’s simply the truth.
Sure, people have fond memories of their original homeland, of the old country or of good times spent in other places, but once they become Americans, few of them ever want to be anything else. Immigration has always been an American issue, but emigration never was. As the saying goes, people vote with their feet – they go where they want to be.
Your personal preferences may cause you to attribute America’s good fortune to pure luck, human industry, the fruits of freedom or to a beneficial Supreme Being or to any combination of these.. Nonetheless, most Americans realize that they have so much to be thankful for we could use four or five Thanksgiving holidays a year. Now, there’s a good idea.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident. Portions of this essay on Thanksgiving appeared in 2007 as a guest column written by Richman.
