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In the USA Thanksgiving Suffers Getting Shit on by Christmas and People are "Thankful" for Blind Luck

This is my forty-sixth Thanksgiving and it's become probably the most frustrating holiday for me.

It's all about food

Thanksgiving is basically a Fall harvest festival with a thin religious overlay and a putative connection to a tiny group of early English settlers. But in practice, it's really all about eating.

And that's kind of nice, because like Halloween, there isn't a whole lot of pressure. Yes, we all get the message that we're supposed to be oh so happy to get together with our family, and there's pressure to roast the turkey perfectly (it's not the easiest bird to cook, but probably not the hardest either.).

Compared to Christmas, when the pressure to maintain "childlike wonder", "joy", and "goodwill" 24/7 leads to skyrocketing rates of depression; and New Year's Eve, when you're a loser if you don't have someone to have that deep meaningful romantic kiss with, Thanksgiving is refreshingly low-key.

Holy shit, people! Can't you wait until December, or do you have such a throbbing hard-on for xmas that you just can't keep it in your pants!?

Unfortunately, nowadays Christmas takes a hot steaming turd all over Thanksgiving every year. The xmas lights, music, and displays start coming out **before** Thanksgiving has even begun. This year during the coverage of Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, they did the stupid, "Let's look at some instagram photos", skit and there were three xmas-themed pictures. Fuck you people; just fuck you.

One of the hosts at least had the decency to mention that maybe it was a little wrong to be showing xmas pics during a Thanksgiving Day Parade, but the other host was like, "Oh, I eat that shit up! Xmas as soon as possible!". I was really hoping someone would punch her in the face, but it never happened.

Yahweh/Jesus/Allah gets credit for everything except for the bad stuff, which gets blamed on Satan, or explained away with "mysterious ways", or some other bullshit.

OK, first of all, the people we call the "pilgrims" **did** have a Thanksgiving in the 1620s or so, but that wasn't a new thing; or even special. Thanksgivings were these occasional things that people held going way back to thank the gods for whatever crap people gave them credit for.

The "first" Thanksgiving, as it's known here, included fifty-some British colonists and ninety-something Indians. How much the colonists thanked the Indians for helping them survive by giving them food and teaching them to hunt and grow corn, versus how much they thanked Yahweh/Jesus is unknown to me.

It was only an occasional thing; sporadically held as in ancient times when something big happened. Abraham Lincoln established a Thanksgiving in 1863 to thank He-who's-name-must-not-be-used-in-"vain" for not killing absolutely everyone in the bloodiest war so far in American history, and it's been an annual tradition ever since.

This could be a holiday where we come together and thank actual people for the actual things they do, but instead, our stupid religious heritage fucks that up. It's a tradition in many homes to go around the table and have everyone say what they're "thankful for". And what gets said is stuff that can't be attributed to anyone, like "I didn't get COVID" or something.

For the religious, of course, there's no problem. He-who's-name-must-not-be-used-in-"vain" gets thanked for this kind of stuff. But for the non-delusional, this presents a problem.

As a child, I just sort of accepted that being "thankful" meant being glad about stuff that no-one is responsible for. But this is just one more piece of Christian hegemony; just one more factor of subtle indoctrination that we're all exposed to here. This bothers me. It's like the way Christians, and Jews insist that we call their particular tribal god Yahweh, "god", as if it's his name (which it is not). And how they insist that the big question is whether there is "a god" or not... as if they've somehow won the argument against polytheism (which they have not).

So personally, when I find myself in one of these Thanksgivings and people ask me what I'm "thankful" for, expecting me to say something for which no one can be thanked, I make a point of thanking an **actual person** for something they actually did. Crazy, right?

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✍️ Last Updated: 2022-01-16

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