This year I had two Thanksgivings, one on Thursday and one on Friday, both with wonderful friends. Much good food and friendly conversation. It's really the only American secular holiday. The best thing about it was that never once in two celebrations was I or anyone else asked what we were thankful for. It's a question that has always made me feel uncomfortable when I've had to respond in front of a group. Once when this happened, after about 10 "I'm thankful for family" responses, I responded, "I'm thankful for Abe Lincoln, for making it a national holiday. I thought it was funny. No one else did.
In my youth, I celebrated many Thanksgiving holidays with my nuclear and extended Jewish family. They were loud and raucous, sort of like the Thanksgiving scene in Annie Hall (1:20-2:28 on the video). Value judgments, opinionated comments about family members who weren't there, and general blowhardiness from genuine blowhards flowed like a river. I loved every minute of it, especially the food.
In our Thanksgivings the question of what we were thankful for never came up. The answer to the question was as obvious as unnecessary to verbalize. The elder elders were thankful that they had gotten the hell out of the Pale and emigrated to the US before they were either victims of pogroms or drafted into the Russian Army. The younger elders were grateful that their parents had gotten out of the Pale, and so they were not victims of the Nazis. And also thankful that their parents were able to emigrate before the US closed its doors after the First World War. Life in the US was not all it was cracked up to be, no gold flowing through the streets, and then the one-two punch of Depression and War that robbed them of their childhoods. But they were alive and glad to be so. In my youth, the US was a great place for Jews to be, antisemitism slowly ebbing as the new Baby Boomers assimilated and the old language and culture (in my family anyway) slowly died out.
The Thanksgivings were, as mentioned above, always loud and chaotic, filled with laughter. But they could have jagged edges. As a young child these edges went right over my head.
As I grew older they became more interesting. One of these was the most interesting and memorable of my life. The other Thanksgivings sort of blend together but this particular one has remained etched in my consciousness. It was at a relative's house. One of the young Boomers in the family had been estranged for some time, over what I never knew. Lets call him Euripides Pants (or EP for short--BTW he had a brother named Eumenides Pants). While a battalion of relatives was chowing down on a ton of feast, EP tinkled his glass. No response. He tinkled it louder. No response. He got up and banged on it almost hard enough to break it. The chatter slowly stopped. He gave a short speech about how sorry he was to have done things that estranged him, how he wanted this to be a new beginning, because in the end family was everything.
As he finished his speech his mother replied: "Oh EP, blow it out your ass."
I must admit that to this day I am ashamed of my response, but my head was buried low enough in the dressing and potatoes that hopefully it was not too obvious. It was my most memorable Thanksgiving.
Life is as messy as the remains of a plate of Thanksgiving feast. We are all human, riddled with human faults and contradictions. EP was later accepted back into the family as a member in good standing. I lost track of him many years ago. That was a jagged Thanksgiving, but a living, pulsating one. I'm glad I was there.
