Harry; some background on American Thanksgiving, including why Thursday, as well as the reason why the 4th of July is actually celebrated on that very day. Enjoy!
from the Wall Street Journal
>>>November 19, 1999
Holidays for Vagabonds
By BILL KAUFFMAN
Norman Rockwell is enjoying something of a revival at the moment, with a major retrospective traveling the country and the almost respectful attention of art critics who have heretofore dismissed him. But Rockwell's illustrations of front-porch America have never really gone away. Every November, for instance, we are reintroduced to "Freedom From Want," in which Grandmother makes a reverential presentation of a stuffed turkey to a tableful of grinning menfolk and beaming gals. It has become the iconographic American representation of our loveliest secular holiday, Thanksgiving.
Oddly, no one in the painting is looking at Grandma: The progeny are making merry conversation and Grandpa is ravenously eyeing the bird, which in death has become rather more succulent than Grandma. But how would this scene play out in today's America? An end-of-the-millennium Rockwell might well depict the children gazing in slack-jawed wonderment at the bearer of the turkey, as if to ask: "Who the hell is the old lady?"
"Freedom From Want"
Never before have there been so many grandparents in America, and yet in a heartbreakingly large number of cases the job of grandparent has been reduced to sending Hallmark cards and gift-wrapped Pokemon games to far-away grandchildren come Christmas. (Or, as the tykes learn to call it in public school, the Holiday Season.) At Thanksgiving, if the far-flung pilgrims of modern America do return, they reconstitute the family like those reverse-action shots in movies, in which an alien who has been blown to bits is made whole again.
Pregnant With Loss
These gatherings, however bathed in love, are marred by the knowledge of their transience. They are glancing, evanescent, incomplete. The hugs and kisses and laughter that fill the TV time-outs during the Lions game are pregnant with loss. For family life must be continuous to have meaning; without proximity, kinship fades. And today's families have everything but proximity.
I am blessed in this regard, for almost every relative, near and distant, lives within 30 miles. We see each other all the time, so when we sit down to turkey and my 86-year-old grandmother's hand-ground stuffing and pumpkin pie, the holiday will not resemble the all-too-common American experience: a table of tense strangers or inwardly weeping mothers, dreading the weekend's goodbyes and tearful departures even before the grandkids (how they've grown!) have carved out the first mashed-potato lakes.
The families of vagabonds seem to have selected Thanksgiving as the time for the designated annual reunion, probably because it still falls on a Thursday, and even the most Scrooge-ish nonretail employers have given up on squeezing any productivity out of the following Friday. Thanksgiving was exempted from the shameful Uniform Holiday Act of 1968, under which Congress, prodded by the Chamber of Commerce and the travel industry, booted holidays from their traditional dates and into the nearest Monday. The father of the three-day weekend was Florida Sen. George A. Smathers, who wanted to move Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July to Monday as well, but the solons weren't that far gone.
Lest we forget, the hosts of the first Thanksgiving were not locals. But our contemporary rootlessness is not so much in our genes as in our policies. The domestic diaspora of the past 60 years is due more to government actions than to an invisible hand sending us hither and yon. Consider World War II, for which Rockwell's "Freedom From Want" raised war bonds. More than 15 million Americans, or 12% of the civilian population, resided in a different county in March 1945 than they had on Dec. 7, 1941 -- and this doesn't count the 12 million soldiers.
The dislocations of World War II and the Cold War, accelerated by the interstate highway system and federal subsidies to colleges and universities, led to a situation today in which one of every three Americans live outside their natal state. In 12 states, natives are a minority of the population, most fantastically in Nevada, Bugsy Siegel's paradise, where 80% were born elsewhere. Nevada isn't a state: It's a hotel with senators.
At the opposite pole stands Pennsylvania, four-fifths of whose residents are homegrown. Thus the pop standard of American mobility, "Home for the Holidays," gets it all wrong with its line: "I met a man who lives in Tennessee and he was heading for Pennsylvania and some homemade pumpkin pie."
The Mark of a Loser
"There's no place like home for the holidays," sighs the wandering minstrel, but to millions of children of the middle and upper-middle classes, the holidays are about the only time they get back home. Parents ache with longing for their absent sons and daughters, but they also swell with pride, for many measure success by the distance one has traveled from home. To stay in the neighborhood is the mark of a loser. The children of our largely rootless professionals are hypermobile: Even the daughter of the president felt compelled to move 3,000 miles from the hearth when she hit 18, though she might plausibly plead extenuating circumstances.
Our vernacular prizes mobility. "She's going places," we say of a bright young girl, meaning someplace far from here, for why would the talented want to stick around the old homeplace? On the other hand, if we say of a boy, "He's not going anywhere," we are not praising him for his steadfastness but rather dismissing him as an ambitionless sluggard. Immobility remains among the virtues of rural and working people, though as the factories close (most small farms were swallowed up long ago) the degreeless, too, are scattering.
"Mobility is associated with psychiatric casualty rates among both adults and children," wrote two researchers at Walter Reed who studied the emotional imbalances of peripatetic military brats. But don't hold your breath waiting for mobility to become a political issue. For what is Washington if not one vast homeless center, sheltering the lawyers and wonks of Everywhere, U.S.A.?
As for Norman Rockwell, he disliked his beloved painting. He thought "Freedom From Want" gloated over American prosperity. Though when we look upon it today, the turkey and trimmings are a mere detail. What we see are the faces of the family. They will be sitting there for a good long time. And not a one has a plane ticket stuffed in her overnight bag.
p.s. the writer calls it a secular holiday (probably) because, one might infer, he is of the Jewish faith, & not familiar with the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.
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