Ye Olde Thanksgiving Dinner: A Cult Classic
from The Curmudgeon's Home Companion, November 1997
Imagine a small group of people so intensely devoted to religious fundamentalism that they decide to journey into the deepest, darkest wilderness in order to protect themselves and their children from such “decadence” as clothes with a bit of color to them and church sermons only an hour long. Not only that, but these extremists decide to make their trip at the worst possible time, the beginning of winter. Moreover, they bring with them few of the necessities they’ll need to survive, and hardly any food.
This may sound like the Donner party or yet another Montana gun-nut collective, but in fact it’s a description of the Pilgrims, those grim folks who supposedly originated our Thanksgiving harvest festival. From what I know of the Pilgrims, I’m mostly thankful that none of them are around anymore to spoil our fun.
Let’s face it: These people were cranks. They left merry old England to protect their own religious purity and moved to Holland. Then they decided to leave Holland because they didn’t want their children learning Dutch ways (and this was before Amsterdam instituted its free-drug policies, so what were they worried about—ice skating?). They determined to go to the New World so that they could raise their children the way they saw fit, which is a bit like protecting your kids from gang violence by moving to Antarctica.
But the real proof of their craziness is that, rather than stay a few months longer in sinful old Europe, they hopped a boat to America in mid-September, ensuring that they’d arrive at the start of the long, bitterly cold New England winter. Now I’m as tolerant of other people’s religious foolishness as the next atheist, but to me there’s precious little difference between the Pilgrims’ travel plans and those of the Heaven’s Gate crowd, except Do and company probably had more comfortable shoes.
No doubt the Pilgrims’ unwilling hosts were astonished to see this sickly, ragtag bunch appear, and then pretty annoyed when they realized that they were going to have to feed and support these loonies until they could grow their own the next year. The one thing these strange arrivals had going for them was their nice warm winter clothes.
But spring came, and then summer, and the Pilgrims were still wearing their winter clothes. The locals must have figured that wherever these heavily bundled aliens had come from, they had serious emotional problems.
Although plenty of people complain that we ought to put the Christ back in Christmas and the Yahweh back into Judaism, I’ve never heard anyone argue for putting the Puritanism back into Thanksgiving.
Having a Pilgrim at your Thanksgiving table would be even worse than entertaining most of your relatives. He’d probably insist on saying grace before the meal and then take so long that the turkey would dry up and the yams get cold. Of course, some of us have to contend with modern-day Puritans, those people whose idea of a good time is ruining everyone else’s. While you carve the turkey they point out that the delicious crispy skin will surely lead to heart attacks, and as soon as seconds are offered they sniff that while we’re all sitting here stuffing ourselves like pigs, somewhere children are starving.
It used to be that you had to eat up because children in Armenia were starving, although I never understood how my eating leftovers would fill someone else’s belly in Armenia, wherever that was. Now we’re supposed to not eat for the good of the hungry, except I happen to know that the leftovers we don’t get to aren’t shipped overseas: they just go into the garbage.
Anyway, the point of Thanksgiving isn’t suffering or self-denial, but abundance and overindulgence. That’s because it wasn’t the Pilgrims who made it a national holiday, but George Washington. You could probably fob any old meal off on the Pilgrims, but Washington seems like he’d appreciate a serious spread and be fun to have at the table besides, especially if he brought Jefferson, Franklin, and several bottles of wine with him. Now there’s a crowd you wouldn’t dare serve a “butter-n-broth-basted” frozen turkey to.