Happy Thanksgiving!

It's not inaccurate, at least in spirit

Thanksgiving, the forgotten holiday.  But for grocers and turkey farmers, I think many would forget it's here.  In recent years, our friends in Wall Street almost seemed as if they wished they could ban the holiday in order to get to the much needed spending frenzy of St. Walmart season.  That attitude was joined by the Left's ever enduring crusade to find disaffected descendents of those wronged by the US government or Europeans in general and rally them to bring and end once and for all to the American experiment.  

It wasn't long ago that I would have bet that in a decade or more it would be a holiday long replaced by Juneteenth, or some other celebration of America's unforgivable sins.  But alas, we have Covid.  Suddenly, the only thing that matters is Covid, and insisting Americans do anything but celebrate that holiday as they have.  To do so, the holiday itself has to be lifted up, just to demonstrate how great the sacrifice we're being told to make really is. 

Why, I've actually seen news stories talking about how great the holiday is, how necessary, how essential.  That makes being told we can't celebrate it all the more powerful.  It also makes our willingness to acquiesce and do as we're told all the more noteworthy.  

True, in all the 'why Thanksgiving matters' I don't think I've seen a single pilgrim or Mayflower anywhere.  But then, truth be told, it was never the big thing.   I remember in first grade a picture of the pilgrims on their way to church (famous painting) and talking about the story.  I remember it being mentioned a couple times through the years.  But we didn't worship them or anything, as Americans are sometimes accused of doing.  Mostly we admired their courage, their devotion, and the role they played for helping to lay the groundwork for this most prosperous and free nation we inherited.  That's when we mentioned it at all.  Sometimes it was like in kindergarten, when the emphasis was just on turkey art and making gooey pumpkin pie as a group project. 

But celebrating our heritage, and those who made it all happen, is certainly our approach to the holiday.  We've resisted where some Catholics go in trashing and hashing the pilgrims.   In an odd twist, the Orthodox seemed willing to give a nod to the pilgrims and their story more than Catholics.  But then, they might have seen the pilgrims as a finger in the Church's eye, and that could also be reason for the pilgrim love.

Whatever, despite other traditions joining the modernist in trashing the pilgrims and their story, and despite the attempt to rally more and more people to attack and destroy anything to do with the whole Western and American stories, we are happy to tip our hats to Christians who were, in many ways, better than us.  So Happy Thanksgiving.  Enjoy it while we can.  And remember what could have been.