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Sparkle (1)
This is apparently the version of Thanksgiving that they teach in kindergarten: the Mayflower came filled with smiling pilgrims who all wore cool hats and shoes with buckles. Wait, no, they were also sad because they had no toys. When they got here, they realized that they didn't know how to farm this strange new land (because, apparently, dirt is different over here vs. England), but their new friends -- the native Americans -- taught them. In the winter, they were sad and homesick, and some of the pilgrims were even very ill! But they sat down with their new friends -- those native Americans -- and made a big dinner to say thank you and celebrate the fact that they were here in a new land. (Though my daughter asked a good question: how does killing animals and making someone else eat them say "thank you?") They were all happy and sang songs and even did a few dances around the table.
The End.
And that Thanksgiving story is precisely what makes us feel like shit when we come to our own Thanksgiving table feeling less than stellar when our life is craptastic. As kids, we're told this sanitized version of events because can you imagine your kindergarten teacher telling you the truth?
That out of the 103 pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower, only 53 were alive for that meal? And only 4 of them were women, so good luck with that re-population effort, my friends. And those new friends, the native Americans? 90% had died of leptospirosis a few years before the Mayflower landed. They couldn't defend their land because there were so few of them still alive. The pilgrims robbed the native American graves for corn stores, creating a strange tension as they tried to build a relationship with the remaining native Americans. But yes, they did sit down for a three day feast that included wild turkeys and deer.
So with all of that shit going down, are you honestly going to tell me that the coping mechanisms of the pilgrims was so fierce that they were able to set aside that small fact that half of their compatriots (as well as spouses, children, or parents) were dead and they were across the sea from anything familiar and grin through the feast?
Are we honestly expected to believe that the pilgrims didn't bitch about the cold or the fact that they were eating corn that had been in the ground with corpses a few days earlier or the fact that their loved ones were dead -- that they smiled and thanked G-d that they were alive, and we're all supposed to set aside anything we might be feeling and just talk about how freakin' thankful we are? That we're supposed to become Suzy Sunshine for one day of the year and grasp to find silver linings in our life even if we've just lost someone we love or were downsized from our job or had a miscarriage or broke up with our partner.
Well, call me less self-actualized than the pilgrims, but I can't set aside everything that is happening in my world when I sit down to a dinner table -- even if it's a dinner that took several days to prepare and the table is populated by people I love (and who love me back regardless of my mood). I can't let it go, and frankly, I don't really believe that the pilgrims let it go. But I do think we do a world of damage when we perpetuate that myth and teach it to our kids.
They should know that sometimes things suck, and sometimes, you have to feel what you're going to feel while things suck. That it's okay to mourn and it's okay to cry and it's okay to not pull yourself up by the bootstraps based on someone else's timetable rather than your own. And that sometimes, when you push yourself to do something, you find that you actually derived a great deal of peace from the experience. Such as sitting down at the Thanksgiving table when you're sort of dreading being around people.
Every year, I write a Holiday Survival Guide because I think that everyone experiences something
