A colleague at work asked me, “So, like, what are people supposed to be thankful for on Thanksgiving, anyway? What’s it all about?”
When I was a kid it was all about getting two days off school and eating as much as you could. Other than that, pretty dull. I remember once going and standing in the middle of the main road, to prove how dead everything was. Not a car in sight. Woo.
So I said, the first-ever Thanksgiving was about the Pilgrims being thankful they hadn’t starved to death over the winter.
“So we’re thankful we’re not dead? I can do that.”
This is a guy who, when I asked how he was, put his hand over his heart and said: “Well I still have a pulse. Yeah, fine thanks.”
Then you start thinking… it’s been a hard, hard, really quite rubbish year in several big, important ways. Much of it continues rubbish, and there are frets and worries aplenty, and doubts about the future. But lots of good things are happening now, and when you get your head up out of it all you can see the good things. Then you can start enjoying them a bit. Then you realise how good they might in fact be. Then you realise how many of them there are. Then you realise the good thing is you’re getting through it.
Why, you’re a very Pilgrim.
We don’t do Thanksgiving Day in Baroque Mansions: even aside from the political aspects, and being in England where nothing stops for Thanksgiving – in fact, where Thanksgiving falls at an annoyingly busy time of the year, as everyone struggles to fulfill all their commitments before Christmas – I’ve always found the inherent sentimentality of the occasion a little cloying. Also the rich food, which at the moment I can’t eat, anyway, because my stomach is one of the rubbish things about this year. (The turkey itself, though – at least what the Americans euphemistically call the “white meat” – is low-fat, so I can eat that. But I’m not cooking a whole turkey.)
But my colleague’s right.
So here is an ambiguous poem about an ambivalent holiday. I think it’s ambivalent, anyway… You readers who are so great, if you have any ideas about this poem, put them on a postcard in the comments, please.
It’s by Emily Dickinson, of course.
One day is there of the series
Termed “Thanksgiving Day”
Celebrated part at table
Part in memory -
Neither Ancestor nor Urchin
I review the Play -
Seems it to my Hooded thinking
Reflex Holiday
Had There been no sharp subtraction
From the early Sum -
Not an acre or a Caption
Where was once a Room
Not a mention whose small Pebble
Wrinkled any Sea,
Unto such, were such Assembly,
‘Twere “Thanksgiving day” -
Thanks for the Emily!
You’re welcome! At her mysterious best.
Dear Katy
Emily Dickens is one of my favourite poets. She seldom wastes words and I especially like the line ‘Wrinkled any Sea.’ Last year we celebrated Thanksgiving with our American friends in Rochechouart. This year not. Does Thanksgiving still hold any sentimantal value for you?
Best wishes from Simon
Things possibly said on that first Thanksgiving
1. “Squanto, pass ye eels.”
2. “Miles Standish, shut up and sit down.”
Only minimal, as you can see… just the family get-together aspect.
As you can imagine, I’m horrified by the friend’s seemingly brain-dead lack of comprehension that there might be something to be thankful for in spite of everything we wish would be otherwise. I find it a matter of objectivity rather than sentimentality to be consciously thankful of the mere fact of BEING; thankful for the fact that life exists in multitudinous forms (whether or not we treat then well, which is a separate issue); that there are people to love and food to enjoy, tasks to do, ideas to think, Emily to quote; thankful even for the fact that the kids were kettled rather than mowed down. Yes, how very unsophisticated.
Ma, it’s England. Americans love to go around talking about how thankful they are about everything; in England it sounds like bragging about how great your life is. It ‘s not the feeling, it’s the expression. Ironic and understated goes down fine over here. And anyway, my friend is right: going back to first principles, even if you feel really hacked off with everything, being thankful you’re alive is a great place to start.
Dear Katy
I meant sentimental! ( Is it better to draw attention to a typo or just hope that no one else notices?)
Best wishes from Simon
Simon I didn’t notice! Is it better to pretend I left you to it, or admit I failed?
My thinking on “One day” is this— as an American with mixed-feelings about Turkey Day.
Dickinson’s sense of religious devotion is nothing, if not consciously intelligent, and thoroughly active, i.e.., made personal, existential. A critical eye examines the story humans tell about themselves (the play), and refuses any influence of sentiment (Hooded, possibly suggesting monks habit). So, ‘One day’ is a reflection, from this optic: on the very idea of some day believed appropriate to give thanks and the American ‘Thanksgiving Day‘ marked by the pleasure of food (Urchin) and by a day symbolizing America’s historic myth of origins (Ancestor, memory).
“Thanksgiving Day”, as practiced, is a day of the (mundane) ‘series’ of days marking earthly life, a day simply chosen (Reflex) to commemorate the risks and pains of the first settlers; it does not correspond to an actual day in history during the settlement period. The day cannot be marked definitively (Caption), nor situated in any precise location (acre). What is more, our celebration has no specific connection with the deep expression of thanks experienced by the settlers who lived the supposed events of a moment of Providence. If this day were not called ‘Thanksgiving Day”, in any event, Dickinson would have no poem: her reflection is on the words.
As one may easily imagine, all our earthly days would be just part of a monotonous series of planet turns, had there not been an actual day (subtracted from the early sum) in Israel when Christ was born; a fairly banal event (Pebble) with momentous consequences (Wrinkled any Sea), punctuating all of our days (of the Assembly of days, the series) with a game-changing stroke. So, the upshot of all this, as anyone may have already guessed, is: the answer to what is Thanksgiving Day? is ‘every day’, and every hour, and every minute of every day. The day when thanks is given is not focused on itself, but upon the real day of Christ’s birth, on a real place on earth.
However, Emily Dickinson, was certainly not disparaging of our Thanksgiving Day holiday, nor the sentiment it expresses. She was deeply human in her faith, embracing earthly life with all its feeling, but also under obligation to the earthly fact of intelligence, especially calling for a morally developed sense of generosity and empathy toward others— not a ‘natural’ (earthly) reflex of purely reactive instinct. But, I do not wish to suggest this is anything more than my reflection on the poem. Being all she was, alive in spirit, and trusting us to share her fascination with having an illuminating mind, she wrote the poem to invite us to make the sort of effort I have made in the hopes the process of making the connections, or becoming more aware, would change me for the better. In short, the poem is in the process. I am not religious myself, but Emily Dickinson always changes me.