There is a tradition around eating tables at Thanksgiving where we all take turns revealing that for which we are most thankful. Even if you aren’t, you gotta come up with something. You know its coming, so even if you’ve got nothing, it’s necessary to have an answer ready when your turn pops around.
This ritual can feel a bit empty. For most who live a ‘first world’ existence, our problems can seem small and insignificant compared to the real problems in the world. We try to give where we can as an acknowledgement, but with so much hate and need all around, some arbitrary Thursday as winter approaches seems like an odd and rather compartmentalized time for an outpouring of gratitude. Even weirder is what follows, a day of gross consumerism. You have to admit it; we Americans sure know how to juxtapose one idea with another.
Instead of a month of Christmas music, I boil the season down to one song. Darrell Scott’s “The Day Before Thanksgiving” is the one tune that I have to hear each year, usually several times. Set against the backdrop of the family dinner, Darrell (who has appeared in Hickory several times) sets the tone in his first stanza. “It’s the day before Thanksgiving, I’m not feeling much of thanks. Just a low grade desperation leaves me reeling in the ranks.” It’s folky, contemplative, and captures a seldom mentioned sentiment of the season ahead, disillusionment.
We can all thank Abraham Lincoln for the creation of this holiday. In the midst of the Civil War, he thought a moment set aside for being thankful seemed appropriate and since he was president, he so decreed it. Thanksgiving commemorates a time when the Pilgrims, who had only been stateside for a year, broke bread with the people who saved them from starvation, not long before they began to shove them west onto Reservations and almost, into extinction. Again, what a contrast.
If you listen to Darrell Scott, he has some very definite ideas about how all that worked, but from a historical perspective, the holiday exemplifies an important truism about remembrance. It’s not really about what actually happened in 1621 that matters. It’s more about what we in 2025 can take from the event and apply to our own lives. We hope that looking back upon whatever happened all those years ago gives us inspiration in our time, which makes history much more about whatever is going on now. The past is just a lens through which to see it.
Whatever your feelings about the upcoming season, Thanksgiving offers a reset. No matter if the year rapidly coming to a close was great or crappy, here comes a day to reflect, followed by a season of giving and a new year for each of us to make things better than they are now.
So, when your turn comes, if you are thankful for Darrell Scott and Abraham Lincoln, you and I will have the same answer and somebody out there will know what you mean, even if those around the dinner table do not.
Photo: Lincoln crashes the party and looks to us for meaning.
