On the Problems & Possibilities of Thanksgiving

In which I extend an invitation

I whipped together a recording of today’s essay, trip ups included, so perhaps you can listen while you cook, bake, drive, work, or maybe take a walk.

My mom’s Thanksgiving table, from 2022

So about tomorrow…

Problems abound with Thanksgiving. I think we’re quite clear on that at this point, yes? The history of the holiday is rife with racism, white supremacy, and colonial ideology. The present is drowned in late stage capitalism.

That is not really the scope of this essay, though. I don’t have that in me today, nor do I really have the right to speak on that. I will say I’ve appreciated the perspectives of Oglala Lakota Sioux chef Sean Sherman and this essay from Montana Poet Laureate and enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, Chris La Tray.

I think it’s important to note that today, tomorrow, everyday I write to you from the stolen homelands of the Susquehannock/Conestoga. Tomorrow I will be eating a meal on the stolen lands of the Susquehannock/Conestoga and Piscataway.¹

I’ve been thinking about the shadow side of this holiday, as it were, much more than I’ve been thinking about what I usually would have thought about: the meal, what I’m making, who will be there, what I’ll wear, etc. A good change, I say.

I find I have three things I’d like to say. Take them or leave them.

1. We do need ritual, gathering, and a way to honor the seasons. Maybe this isn’t it? Or maybe it is?

This, it seems, is presently as good as it gets when it comes to seasonal celebrations in modern American culture.

I’ll state my bias: Thanksgiving has long been my preferred festivity, of the available options. It’s ostensibly “fall focused,” and you know I love fall. It’s less dizzying than Christmas. I like the lack of build up; it’s one day, that’s it. There’s less influence of capitalism and no stress of giving gifts to people who don’t need anything. And the focus is on gathering around the table. I’ve always liked that element.

But I now realize it’s really not enough.

As humans, we deeply need rituals and celebrations, and many of the traditional ones that would have marked our lives—like the solstices and equinoxes—have fallen by the wayside. Yet this intrinsic need for ritual remains² We also need opportunities for gathering and togetherness, though that may not be easy (more on that shortly). Thanksgiving is a chance for this, whether it’s with blood relations or chosen family. It’s a chance for connection in a special, “set apart” way. A “holy” day. With division and isolation rampant we need all the chances to connect that we can get.

Personally, I wish it was more though. This doesn’t seem like it’s cutting it.

I wonder what this holiday will be like when a younger generation with different priorities is in charge of the festivities. What will we do in my family? Will we prioritize connection over tradition? Will we cook a meal inspired by indigenous food to honor the people whose land we’re on? Will we be spread out across the country and have to find a different way to celebrate? How will we opt out of what capitalism has done to this holiday? Will the “importance” of Thanksgiving fade in comparison to the holidays I hope to incorporate more: the solstices and equinoxes?

For now though, I appreciate that the Thanksgiving meal is one of the few that acknowledges the seasons and the more-than-human world, to whatever small degree. Seasonal produce—much of which also happens to come from this land—takes the stage: pumpkin, sweet potatoes, corn, maple, turkey.³ We might decorate with pumpkins, corn, straw, leaves or other fall paraphernalia. Whether these things are real or fake, it’s more of a nod to seasonality than we get most other times.

It’s something, and that doesn’t mean we should stop here.

As Sean Sherman writes in his essay: “There is no need to make Thanksgiving about a false past. It is so much better when it celebrates the beauty of the present.”

I wonder too what we can transform it into in the future.

2. Gratitude.

Supposedly, this holiday is about gratitude and thanksgiving. It is, after all, in the name.

Does this get lost? Yes. Yes, very much so. Aside from the prayer before the meal (if you are of that persuasion), how much thanks is there in your Thanksgiving? There hasn’t been all that much in my own.

For several years though, my family played a “thankfulness game” where we all wrote down something we were thankful for that year on a slip of paper with our name and threw that in a bowl. Someone would read out each item without the name of the person whom it belonged to and we’d have to write down our guess for who said which thing. At the end, all would be revealed, we laugh a bunch at how wrong or right or surprised we were, and we’d tally up our score. I think the usual prize was a Yankee candle or Starbucks giftcard. Now, we’re a group prone to smart-assery and I can’t say there weren’t children (young and old) who didn’t write down smart ass things just to throw people off.⁴ But I think that’s the closest I’ve come to experiencing an infusion of gratitude into this holiday. I don’t love that there was a prize at the end but at least along the way we got in touch with others, and our own, gratitude.⁵

We need more of that. Not just tomorrow, but every day. Tomorrow’s as good a day as any to start though.

Can we center the gratitude for this holiday?

Some of the trouble is, I think in modern American culture—at least the one I’ve known—we’re quite out of touch with connecting to and expressing gratitude. Our society is also so obsessed with independence and individuality, making natural dependence and reciprocity difficult to see.

I think the Thanksgiving Address shared by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass is a good place to start.⁶ Which is not to say that I think people like me should co-opt it and read it at our dinning room tables tomorrow. No. I think it’s a good read. It’s a window into another perspective. It’s wisdom that hopefully can spark our own inquiry. I love how it highlights how much we can and should express gratitude for. This is not the thirty second prayer of my childhood, the one that blessed the meal and praised the hands that made it amen. This goes deeper.

We need to go deeper.

How much can we thank? How much can we acknowledge as kin, as wiser older sibling on this land, as being that provided something to us, as those we are dependent on?

How can we infuse this holiday with more of that? Can we crowd out that which isn’t true thanksgiving?

To borrow from elsewhere in Braiding Sweetgrass:

“What is the duty of humans? If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking ‘What is our responsibility?’ is the same as asking ‘What is our gift?’ It is said that only humans have the capacity for gratitude. This is among our gifts.”

3. Tomorrow is going to be hard for a lot of us.

I’m sorry if this is true for you. It’s true for me.

It could be because of family. It could be because of what you can’t say. It could be because of what you have said or what’s been said to you. It could be because your family won’t accept you for your full self. It could be because you have no where to go and no one to share it with. It could be because food and eating are not mundane things for you, due to finances, an eating disorder or chronic illness. It could be because drinking is not a mundane thing for you. It could be because of abuse and trauma. It could be because you thought you’d have a partner or child to share the holiday with by now and you don’t. It could because you don’t want to field intrusive questions from a family member. It could be because of sensory overwhelm. It could be because of loved ones now missing from the table.

It could be many more things, each one valid.

I want to acknowledge that that is seldom acknowledged. This holiday, all holidays, contain so much possibility for joy and pain.

That is really the intention of today’s essay: I want to give us all space.

I hope that you will do what you need to do for yourself tomorrow.

Let’s remember, this is the season of grief, of heaviness. More and more I find this comforting—not that there is so much grief right now, but that the more I connect with the more-than-human world it feels like this season can hold that along with me. But that nod to sorrow is not build into our modern construction of this holiday. Another thing for us to weave into our holidays of the future.

For now, I invite you here. It’s not my dinning room table where we can celebrate in an intentional, gratitude-filled way. But it’s what I’ve got.

The comments of this essay are open to all for saying what you need to say, sharing what you need to share, musing about what this holiday could be, and speaking gratitude for what is. Come join me there if that feels like a good place to you.

And thank you for reading. Thank you for being here.

1. If you are on Turtle Island and don’t know whose land you reside on, I recommend this online tool: https://native-land.ca

2. Someday I will finish Casper ter Kuile’s book The Power of Ritual: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-power-of-ritual-casper-ter-kuile

3. I enjoyed this essay on the history of the turkey from my new favorite SubstackBird History.

4. I believe a twelve year old cousin wrote “whiskey” one year. Others have used Latin names for things, or purposefully written there’s to sound like another family member.

5. We stopped the practice in 2021, when it seemed too heavy to share our gratitude. Instead, we played Tellestrations, which I also recommend but does not quite encourage the same thing.

6. Here is a version: https://americanindian.si.edu/environment/pdf/01_02_Thanksgiving_Address.pdf And also this version is lovely: https://earthtotables.org/essays/the-thanksgiving-address/