COLUMN: Nothing says thanks like gluttony
I blame my narcissist problems on my birthday.
Most people have at least some love of themselves, and on one day of the year they get to enjoy the overt attention they receive through gifts, phone calls and a birthday cake so rich it reduces yet another year off your already-dwindling life.
But other than a birthday, the celebration of oneself is all inside the head, unless you’re Peyton Manning or Tom Brady, then ESPN does enough celebration for 10 people.
But my situation’s a bit different. You see, I was a Thanksgiving baby. Born a month late – yeah, it’s a wonder my mother still wanted me after all that agony – I arrived just in time for the holiday of all holidays.
Growing up, I anxiously looked forward to the end of November because it meant a nearly week-long celebration of me. School was let out, decorations were hung, football games were played and giant feasts were prepared, all in honor of you know who.
Although, I was always a bit confused about this nonsense about the pilgrims and Indians. Come on now, they weren’t at the hospital when I popped out offering me corn and wild game. What do they have to do with me?
Sadly, my fun was ruined when I discovered the real reason school was canceled for nearly a week – government workers needed yet another excuse to take a day off.
Even though I know people really aren’t celebrating me, I figure if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, so I celebrate Thanksgiving with a near religious fervor.
The real purpose of this holiday is hidden behind a curtain of commercial advertisements. I’m still anxiously waiting for the day Hallmark begins an aggressive marketing campaign where the Thanksgiving turkey finds a pot of gold underneath Plymouth Rock, lights fireworks and distributes gifts of wishbones to good children all over the world while they carve little squashes in the form of the Mayflower. That way all the great holidays could be combined in one, and the true meaning of Thanksgiving could be lost just like Christmas or Easter or National Bring a Teacher an Apple Day.
Thanksgiving is the greatest holiday of the year. Sure Christmas has the gift giving and the feasts and all the candy you can eat, but Thanksgiving is something special.
It’s a time to reflect on all the things we’re thankful for in life, like buttons. What would life be like without buttons? For certain my shirt wouldn’t stay shut and I would never again be called “cute as a button.” Come to think of it, no one has ever called me that.
And what better way is there to celebrate the things we’re thankful for than eating so much food we want to throw it all up and then do it all over again? After all, nothing says thanks like a little gluttony.
It seems we’ve departed a bit from the first Thanksgiving. And it turns out the origins of Thanksgiving aren’t as simplistic as my elementary school teachers made it out to be. For instance, Thanksgiving didn’t immediately become a smash hit that was celebrated every fourth Thursday of November. In fact, the first Thanksgiving most likely happened between the end of September and early November and was originally only celebrated the one time.
But don’t get the idea that these guys were a bunch of squares who just stood around the campfire with their buckle hats and shoes and a pint of strong brew. Truth be told, these guys knew how to celebrate this holiday. Their Thanksgiving celebration was held for three days and was complete with eating, dancing, singing secular songs – popular ones included such Puritan rock classics as “She Showed Some Ankle,” “Burn, Witch, Burn” and “Plymouth Rock of Ages” – and playing games. They knew how to party like it’s 1621.
I say we bring back this tradition of a three-day holiday. Sure we may get three days off work, but not all three are celebrated equally. In fact, the day after Thanksgiving has turned into the closest thing to a white Watt’s Riot as shoppers sacrifice sleep to fight each other for the newest Tickle Me Elmo that laughs so hard it rolls around. Sounds scary to me.
The food the pilgrims ate sounded pretty good. They had lots of meat and very little vegetables. I guess they figured if they couldn’t get stuff to grow like Squanto could, at least they could shoot some critters out of the trees. Perhaps this is the earliest instance of the whole turkey craze, though I think it really came after the Continental Congress rejected Benjamin Franklin’s idea to eat smoked eagle so the turkey could be preserved as the national bird. Hey, you win some, you lose some.
But there’s one tradition that came from the first Thanksgiving that I don’t like: the segregation between adults and children. This was before the idea that all men truly were created equal and about the same time the song “Short People Have No Reason to Live” came out. Except then they realized they were all kind of short, so they took out their aggression on the children by relegating them to a separate table.
This was a concept I was very familiar with growing up. At my family Thanksgiving feasts, the adults sat at one table talking about boring stuff like politics or who is doing what in the family, and the kids were booted downstairs at a separate table, far away from the pies. There I would awkwardly sit with my cousins and wonder what to talk about. Nervously gnawing on a piece of turkey, I would stare at them and they would stare back at me until finally we would all drop the charade and try to annoy our parents as much as possible by screaming and yelling.
It wasn’t until I was about 18 that I found my way to the adult table. I was actually excited about it until I had to sit through an entire Thanksgiving meal with them talking about who died recently and the different aches and pains in their bodies. Geez, do old people talk about anything exciting?
But even with the segregation, Thanksgiving is still one of the greatest holidays of the year. It’s my one chance each year to get away with eating so much I stand at risk of turning diabetic, watch as much football as I want and blame my sleepiness on the turkey.
Oh, and I still think everyone is celebrating me.
Seth Hawkins is a junior majoring in public relations. Truthfully, this Thanksgiving he is thankful for his beautiful wife. Comments and questions can be sent to him at seth.h@aggiemail.usu.edu.