Thanksgiving, as an institution, is a little like Columbus Day in that it's hard to maintain a pure, naive respect for the holiday once you're enlightened to the fact that most of the American history you ingested as a child is a Eurocentric fiction. Once you learn that encounters between settlers and natives were pretty much always less "smiling cooperation between people with buckled and feathered headgear" and more "misunderstanding and massacre," you no longer feel like singing chipper songs about cornucopias and sailing the ocean blue.
But at least with Thanksgiving, there's still a reason to maintain and enjoy the traditions of the holiday, even if its origins are in a propagandist revision of historical truth. Setting aside a day for mostly uninterrupted time with family/loved ones in a spirit of charitableness is a worthwhile thing to do. Thanksgiving is an uncharacteristically egalitarian holiday. (Are you Jewish? Are you Hindu? Did you just immigrate here from Iceland? Whatever, come over this Thursday and eat turkey at 2 p.m.) It typically doesn't involve the same kind of commercialism or religious tensions that crop up at Christmas, or the sometimes uncomfortable jingoism of the Fourth of July. Thanksgiving is nice, is what I'm saying.
It's nice because "giving thanks" itself is an incorruptibly nice concept. Thanksgiving encourages you to comb through your life and consider all the nice things in it and all the ways in which it could be worse (and, in fact, is worse for lots and lots of other people). You feel grateful for what you have and, in the process, you also hopefully think a little harder about the fact that the world is overall an unjust place, and you go out the next day a little more aware of your own privileges as well as the injustices and tragedies potentially plaguing the lives of the people around you. You treat everyone with a little more kindness as a result.
(That's the idea, anyway, I'm guessing. Black Friday seems designed specifically to complicate the whole "going out the next day in a spirit of charity" thing.)
Central to this whole enterprise is the effort of bringing into consciousness the things you normally take for granted. You may normally not think about the fact that you get to eat every day, have access to clean water, and aren't in danger of being ethnically cleansed—now's the time to feel grateful! If you're a woman or part of a racial minority, you might usually take for granted that you have suffrage or the right to equal opportunity employment—today, you're thinking about your ancestors who worked to make that happen. Are you not dying of a now-treatable disease? Hooray for science and vaccines!
We set aside special times to do this (on Thanksgiving, but also in church, prayer, or meditative moments). Lots of religious teaching, for that matter, Christian and otherwise, is dedicated to helping you think of the big picture and feel grateful on a more consistent basis. Because our minds and bodies naturally resist the effort. We'd rather take things for granted. Day-to-day, we spend our lives trying to make the world the kind of place where we can take more and more stuff for granted, and really, it's a practice infused with its own kind of ethical nobility. Why should I have to be grateful for water? Everyone should have water. I have to say "thank you" for suffrage? Women never should have been denied suffrage in the first place! Isn't the whole point of human innovation and progress to make it so that I don't have to think about dying from tetanus?
It's a tricky line to walk. On the one hand, in order to be a properly empathetic and spiritually complete human, you must be aware of your own specific set of privileges and do what you can to help make things less unfair for those who don't yet have access to the same advantages. On the other hand, there's something beautiful in taking things for granted. My ability to feel unselfconscious and blasé about voting is kind of what my ancestors wanted.
So I guess what I'm most thankful for this Thanksgiving is the ability to take things for granted. Not all the time, of course. But sometimes.
Very well said.
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