TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112789/11278900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.4 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 94

Why We've Failed to Ruin Thanksgiving


By Walter Shapiro


    Who really thinks about Thanksgiving? Most adults absorb
the larger meaning of the holiday as part of the first-grade
catechism (Pilgrims, friendly Indians, a day for offering
thanks) and rarely move beyond Care-Bears sentimentality. This
built-in ickiness is a pity, since it tends to overshadow the
symbolic significance of Thanksgiving, that most unrepentantly
old-fashioned of American celebrations, that patriotic heirloom
that nobody has figured out a way to ruin.

    For nearly 150 years, ever since a women's magazine called
Godey's Lady's Book began championing the cause of an annual
day of Thanksgiving, the topic has been drowning in a syrupy sea
of treacle. Almost every Thanksgiving cliche was in place by
the mid-19th century: snow-thatched New England farmhouses,
menus of turkey and cranberry sauce, families bowing their heads
in grateful prayer, and wayward children dramatically returning
home for the occasion. Even Abraham Lincoln in ushering in the
modern national Thanksgiving holiday could not rise above what
a latter-day President might call "the banality mode." Just
weeks before he composed the soaring sentences of the Gettysburg
Address, Lincoln began his 1863 Thanksgiving proclamation with
this hackneyed conceit: "The year that is drawing toward its
close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and
healthful skies."

    Today, of course, healthful skies mask the hole in the
ozone layer. But in a suddenly peaceful world where the doors
of the Iron Curtain have rusted open, no one should ridicule the
simple giving of thanks. Each of us has private reasons for
gratitude, since in so many ways 1989 has been a bountiful year.
For me, I am sincere in my appreciation for the way the
greenhouse effect has allowed Indian summer to stretch on into
the college basketball season. Moreover, I consider it a
personal blessing that Jackie Mason was canceled, Donald Trump
failed in his efforts to make his name synonymous with American
Airlines, Ronald Reagan managed to return from Japan and no
trend spotter has successfully named the '90s before they
happen.

    Yet Thanksgiving represents more than a litany of good
tidings and an amalgam of turkey-time truisms. There is a
stubborn rectitude to the holiday itself, reminiscent of its
stiff-necked Pilgrim forbearers. More than any other date on the
calendar, Thanksgiving has remained private and personal, devoid
of the tinsel trappings that mar the rest of contemporary life.
On this ecumenical holiday, Americans are allowed to be as
prayerful or as secular as they choose, with no one complaining
that they have somehow taken the thanks out of Thanksgiving.

    For all the public prattle about family values, no other
holiday brings generations together without the lure of
anything more tangible than a good dinner. Think of the novelty
of an extended family forced to spend the day doing little other
than talking, eating and digesting. Distractions are gloriously
limited: the malls are closed and the televised sports offerings
sparse. Unlike New Year's Eve, no one feels compelled to have
the time of one's life or broods unduly when reality fails to
conform to these exaggerated expectations. The perfect
Thanksgiving is timeless, as families replicate their own
familiar rituals, complete with the unconscious re-enactment of
parental conflicts and sibling rivalries that may date back to
the Eisenhower Administration.

    No gastronomical theory can explain the enduring appeal of
the Thanksgiving dinner. The traditional menu is largely a
19th-century re-creation of Pilgrim and Indian fare, and none
of these groups normally claim membership in the world's great
culinary traditions. But miraculously the meal remains a
monument to pre-microwave American cooking. Not even McDonald's
has had the audacity to create McTurkey, nor does Domino's
deliver cranberry pizza. So too are the food faddists
outflanked, as sun-dried tomatoes, imported chevre and oat-bran
anything give way to overstuffed lassitude.

    Americans have grown inured to crass commercialism taken to
excess, with corporate sponsorship profaning everything from
bowl games to the Bill of Rights. But somehow Thanksgiving has
resisted the blandishments of an age of avarice. How the
greeting-card sharpies and the flower-power florists must lament
a national holiday in which they are doomed to play such a minor
role. For if one cares to send the very best, one flies home for
Thanksgiving. Even the TV networks have never figured out a way
to transform Thanksgiving into a prime-time pageant, which is
why the Macy's Parade still takes place in God's own morning
light.

    Politicians are blissfully silent on Thanksgiving. Such
restraint is appropriate for a holiday that commemorates one of
the rare occasions when the white man treated the Indian with
dignity and respect. But public officials may also be chastened
by the experience of Franklin Roosevelt, the only modern
President to try to tamper with Thanksgiving. Back in 1939,
Roosevelt touched off a patriotic uprising when he issued a
proclamation unilaterally shifting Thanksgiving from the then
customary last Thursday in November (the 30th) to the fourth
Thursday (the 23rd) as a way of granting Depression-era
merchants a longer Christmas selling season. F.D.R.'s
Thanksgiving formula was later codified into federal law, but
not before Ogden Nash composed the following couplet:

    Thanksgiving, like Ambassadors, Cabinet officers and
others smeared with political ointment,     Depends for its
existence on Presidential appointment.

    What adds a quaint, almost innocent flavor to this bygone
controversy is the outmoded notion that department stores wait
patiently until the end of Thanksgiving to unveil Santa's
workshop. Now, of course, four-year-olds are still gorging on
Halloween candy when the Saturday-morning ads begin their
incessant shilling for Christmas toys. In a nation where the
mall never palls and seven-days-a-week shopping seems enshrined
as a civic religion, Thanksgiving stands out as an oasis of
tranquillity and a reminder of the values that once tempered
America's materialism. This Thursday give thanks for the one
holiday that cannot be bought.