Thankgiving - A Story We Tell Ourselves

November - 2007

Having just finished my umpteenth bowl of turkey-barley soup, I am not yet sick of thinking about Thanksgiving – or its leftovers. For many food-lovers, this is a holiday utterly without angst or ambiguity. There is none of the subterranean clash of cultures of the religious holidays that surround the winter solstice and none of the hand-wringing over consumerism run amok. Pure and simple, it is about gathering around a table with folks whose company you can stand for at least a few warm, sated hours. And ultimately, it is about the food. I like to think too, that it is about an abundant reverence for what our earth produces, year after year.

Contemporary sources tell us that the story of the First Thanksgiving is a myth. The nation as a whole did not start celebrating the holiday until well after the Civil War and the origins of a first feast are murky, at best. Scholars of food and history exhort us to recall that “Thanksgiving … expresses and reaffirms values and assumptions about cultural and social unity, about identity and history, about inclusion and exclusion.”[1]

But I mean to use the term “myth” the way anthropologists would have us do: a myth is not necessarily an untruth or a fantasy, though in the case of this holiday it is quite fully fabricated, but it is a “story we tell ourselves about ourselves” – a way of explaining who we are and what is meaningful in the experience of being “us”.

In the spirit of that ongoing story, I’d like to share a thought that has struck me for the last several years. It is of the nearly holy serendipity of the Thanksgiving meal. I imagine 300 million Americans sitting down to almost identical dinners. Some of us make an effort to serve this meal to the least fortunate citizens of our society. And considerable resources go to providing that service personnel around the world can also eat the traditional menu. An effort is made, at least on this day, to ensure that people don’t go without. At millions of tables there is a turkey as the centerpiece, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie. Green beans, gravy, and mashed potatoes add heft and color to the meal. But here is where it begins to veer off into millions of tributaries. And this is my second favorite thought about Thanksgiving: that just as there is this almost zen-like moment of 300 million souls sitting down to the same meal – they are also sitting down to radically different ones. It is here, I think, that the modern myth arises. Into the treatment of the bird, the care that goes into its accompaniments, are so many diverse traditions. Chorizo stuffing, candied yams, braised pearl onions, or green bean casserole. In one instance, my cousins hosted a communal celebration to which an Afghan family was invited. They showed up with a magnificent platter of spiced rice with game hens plunged into its steaming, fragrant center. This too, is our uniquely American meal as it is practiced today.

Frankly, I think there is a kind of worship here – whether people agree they’re participating in it or not – one way or another we are breaking bread together as a whole society, with foods that connect us to the recent harvest of our homeland. And at the same time we are bringing our own strains and stories to the table, augmenting and enriching it.

A friend of mine refers to this phenomenon as dynamic tension – between our sameness and our diversity – our moment of communalism and our distinct individuality. Each year at my own table, I enjoy the dance along this line of tension – what elements of my meal will be traditional and what will be new? Who will sit and sup with us who has been here all along, and who will charm us with their new tales of discovery?

I’d like to relate one more myth of a dynamic Thanksgiving celebration – one that highlights so beautifully the unexpected joy that can come from fully embracing the local foodshed. In a small town in New Hampshire, my friend’s family got their turkey every year from a local producer. Because the town was one of those tiny little hamlets, so too, did most of the rest of the residents. Year after year, ordering a turkey from this farmer was just part of the holiday routine. Except that a few Thanksgivings ago (my friend reports that it may even have been a full moon, days before the holiday) the farmer’s exuberant pair of Jack Russell terriers got a wild hair and literally decimated the entire flock. The Jack Russells went on a murderous rampage and didn’t leave a bird fit for dressing.

My friend is a vegetarian and the absence of the turkey was no great culinary loss for her. But the cooks who were at the center of this drama were at a bit of a loss. The meal was to be held at another neighbor’s organic farm, where the table had been hewn out of a single tree. Salvation arrived in the form of a Greek grandmother, who showed up bearing a four foot long Spanikopita, which, combined with a vegetarian’s fantasy of side dishes, more than fed the assembled guests. But apparently theirs wasn’t the only turkey-less feast that year. Reliant on the local source, most of the families in town went without their birds – but returned to ordering again from the farmer the next year. So while recreating a highly structured and stylized ritual – a little local chaos shook things up and changed the feast. But the drive to gather and share was never interrupted.

Each Thanksgiving my own prayer of thanks is for the enormous job of work that brought the food to the table. The continuing mythology of my celebration is made possible and then made wondrous by all the hands, bodies, and backs set to the task. Truly, it is a meal of a thousand variations and a unifying thread, which can nourish our hopeful path forward.

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[1] Janet Siskind The Invention of Thanksgiving: A Ritual of American Nationality