The one holiday Americans seem to be able to agree on is Thanksgiving. It's not rooted in religion, but it fits right in with the teachings of all religions. "Thanks" is nice and generic, like loving your neighbor, helping the poor, and not clogging the doorway on the L when it's rush hour and there is clearly room to stand in the middle aisle. It's an easy sell. Catholics, pagans, atheists and so forth all tend to agree that being thankful is a good thing and we should encourage it.
Thanksgiving is also a nice history lesson and allegory for how different peoples can get along when free food is offered. Different peoples can agree that eating together is more fun than fighting (even if one of those peoples ends up taking the other's land and murdering them surreptitiously with poisoned tokens of peace, but that is another story).
Though it's almost ironic when you consider what the Pilgrims ended up doing to the Indians, today Thanksgiving is America's least offensive holiday. Least offensive because we don't have to avoid saying its name in public, like Christmas; defend it to right-wing fundamentalists who call it perverted, like Halloween; remind us that we're single and might forever be alone, like Valentine's Day; or give it a fake supernatural mascot whose lack of existence only serves to traumatize children when later they learn he's a sham.
We also have no pressure of presents to buy, which relieves the greater pressure of deciding whom to buy presents for, which in turn relieves the even greater pressure of calculating how much to spend … which invariably leads to the realization that we have far less money than we'd like and aren't living the good life like everyone else and woe is we, et cetera.
Thanksgiving has none of that and that makes it a lot easier to deal with.
But on to the bigger meaning. Thanksgiving, in my humble opinion, has the right to be the greatest holiday of the year because it is about being thankful, something society doesn't exactly press upon us as much as it should. We're exposed to so much want and desire — each day as soon as we leave the house or turn on the TV, or Internet, we see ads encouraging us to want things. We need to want things in order to buy things, which is essential in order for the economy to survive. No harm there, in theory.
But there is harm in too much want. A mindset of constant want, constant desire, is one that will quickly lead to unhappiness, because it creates an imbalance, a request that is impossible to meet. Thankfulness is the other half of that feeling, and when it tempers our want, we experience balance. The emotional opposite of wanting is not having, it's being grateful. Having something you want but not feeling grateful for it is not going to relieve your want in the same that way buying food but not eating it is not going to relieve your hunger.
Unfortunately, we can't exactly market gratitude. An ad saying, "Hey, how about today instead of desiring some new sweater we were about to show you, you just go to your closet and revel in all the awesome clothes you already have and feel joy for having such cool stuff in your life?" probably wouldn't make it past the pitch meeting.
But we do have at least one day, one Thursday in November, where the spotlight is given to one of the most important and socially under-emphasized states of being: thankfulness. We don't have to start by trying to be thankful for the hard things, like the cousin who's been belittling you for decades or the parent who still cannot say she is proud of what you've done with your life. We can save those for later, when we're black-belt thankfulness-feelers.
But in the short term, we can be thankful for the little things. Like plates full of carbohydrates, awesome sweaters we already own, and not being the guy who clogs the doorway on the L when there is clearly empty room to stand in the aisle. (You know who you are.)
Happy Thanksgiving.
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