Thanksgiving: Praise the Harvest

After reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I have a new appreciation for Thanksgiving. Kingsolver writes:

[Thanksgiving] is all about what North America has to offer at the end of a good growing season. Thanksgiving is my favorite, and always has been, I suppose because as a child of the farmlands I appreciate how it honestly belongs to us. On Saint Patrick's Day every beer-drinking soul and his brother is suddenly Irish. Christmas music fills our ears with tales of a Palestinian miracle birth, a generous Turkish saint whom the Dutch dressed in a red suit, and a Druid ceremonial tree...I think. But Turkey Day belongs to my people. Turkeys have walked wild on this continent since the last ice age, whereas Old Europe was quite turkeyless.... Corn pudding may be the oldest New World comfort food; pumpkins and cranberries, too, are exclusively ours. It's all American, the right stuff at the right time....

Having more than enough, whether it came from the garden or the grocery, is the agenda of this holiday. In most cases it may only be a pageant, but holidays are symbolic anyway, providing the dotted lines of the social-contract treasure map we've drawn up for our families and nations. As pageantry goes, what could go more to the heart of things than this story of need, a dread of starvation, and salvation arriving through the unexpected blessing of a harvest?

Kingsolver's words are especially poignant this year, when a lot of our neighbors don't have enough, and many are at the "dread" stage of her continuum awaiting some unexpected blessing to arrive. So be your neighbor's blessing...the opportunity might be what you're most thankful for. It offers a chance to reconnect, to care for one another, to revisit what really matters.

Filed under News & Views