A Thanksgiving Carol – Or, How I Learned to Quit Grousing and Love the Turkey

Turkey is a dull meat, and for years I associated its blandness with my general apathy towards Thanksgiving.

Granted, it’s a day off, but it is also marks the start of the holiday season in the US with the horrid mayhem of Black Friday. And while it has an edge over Christmas in that you are more likely to celebrate it with extended family and friends, which is nice, this tends to entail significantly more transit (see Steve Martin classic Planes, Trains and Automobiles). When people say Thanksgiving, I see traffic jams on I-95 and body-checking hordes at Penn Station.  Also, I’m from Maine, where late November falls between autumn splendor and winter wonderland: it’s just cold and bleak. Call me the Scrooge of Thanksgiving, I kind of get where my British colleagues are coming from when they dismiss it as just a jumbo “American” bank holiday that lets people eat “Christmas dinner” twice in six weeks.

But perhaps this Scrooge could do with a visit from the ghosts of Thanksgivings past. Moreover, my British colleagues may be surprised to discover that Thanksgiving has decidedly British roots. After all, the Pilgrims of Plymouth were there at the start. Enter Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop, a native of Suffolk, England and my first ghost. We’ve all heard the myth involving the merry Squanto enjoying corn-on-the-cob with starched colonists, but in 1637, it was Winthrop who formalized what had essentially been a harvest festival.

Thursday, at a decent remove from the Sabbath and a day when ministers would typically give lectures, became the standard day to celebrate Thanksgiving. George Washington, ghost number two, set this in stone in 1789 in his Thanksgiving Proclamation, which acknowledges “with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God.” Good egg and final specter Abraham Lincoln codified the observance in 1863 as the fourth Thursday of November. In 1941 it was ultimately designated by Congress as a federal holiday.

Aside from historical provenance, Brits may also be responsible for naming the turkey, well, “turkey.” NPR posited that when this North American bird first arrived on British shores via Turkish merchants, with Brits giving it the moniker “turkey-coq,” later shortened. Turkey, probably due to its prevalence, eventually became the official Thanksgiving bird in America.

Food for thought.

My skepticism may also stem from my AmeriCanadian heritage: Canadians celebrate a Thanksgiving too (in October), but without as much fanfare.  Then again, having celebrated American Thanksgiving abroad with people of many nationalities, I have come to appreciate what makes it such a special and unique occasion. As I explained to a British colleague, part of why Thanksgiving is such a big deal is its inclusiveness. Modern Thanksgiving embodies the spirit behind the phrase “my fellow Americans”: blind to religion, race, or politics.

While at university in Canada, my few American schoolmates were depressed at the thought of sitting in class while their families doled out the cranberry sauce south of the border.  Summoning my enlightened inner Scrooge, an idea was born: though I couldn’t ask a small Dickensian urchin to fetch the biggest bird in the shop for me, I could stage my own Thanksgiving dinner for homesick Americans. I was feeling the essence of Thanksgiving, and there, in the harsh fluorescent light of the student union building, I brought relative strangers together for community and cheer. Those became the Thanksgivings I’ve enjoyed the most: not with the convenience or automatic trappings of family, but with people who were palpably glad to observe Thanksgiving in the company of friends. After carving our turkey with student-issue bread knives onto mismatched plates, we swapped stories about our own Thanksgivings of yore, and gave thanks for our motley, AmeriCanadian take on Turkey Day. An unconventional menu that would easily combine a Texas-style sweet potato mash topped with marshmallows and a maple doughnut from Tim Hortons.  Kind of like Steve Martin in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, I finally understood what Thanksgiving was really all about.

Happy Thanksgiving, one and all.