bittersweet
Nov. 25th, 2010 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maevele
if I have to use one word for how I feel about thanksgiving, that's the word. Yeah, I'm thankful. My kids are healthy and awesome, we have a nice place to live, and I have awesome friends to spend the day feasting with.
But, the history of the holiday always hangs heavy over me. No matter how we spin it, try to remove ourselves and reclaim it, it's a holiday based on genocide. On being thankful for what we stole, what we killed to claim is ours. And I can't ignore that, and I can't let my kids not know that, so part of the holiday is always that ugly history lesson. And then it hits me on a personal level, what it must have been like for my g-g grandma Rose to prepare a thanksgiving feast to help the family she was married into celebrate the conquest of the family she wanted to have, of her eldest son's father's people. (From what we can tell, her father forced her to marry my white great gr grandpa when she got pregnant by the NA man she wanted to marry. If I think of how that son must have felt at thanksgiving, the bitter gets bigger)
And then on a purely personal level, I get bitter because it was thanksgiving week 5 years ago when my stepdad disowned me. I called to see when to come over, and he told me not to bother, we weren't family. We haven't spoken since, and I haven't seen my nieces since. And that still hurts, actually. It makes me even more thankful for the chosen family I get to spend the holiday with, but it still hurts under that.
But, the history of the holiday always hangs heavy over me. No matter how we spin it, try to remove ourselves and reclaim it, it's a holiday based on genocide. On being thankful for what we stole, what we killed to claim is ours. And I can't ignore that, and I can't let my kids not know that, so part of the holiday is always that ugly history lesson. And then it hits me on a personal level, what it must have been like for my g-g grandma Rose to prepare a thanksgiving feast to help the family she was married into celebrate the conquest of the family she wanted to have, of her eldest son's father's people. (From what we can tell, her father forced her to marry my white great gr grandpa when she got pregnant by the NA man she wanted to marry. If I think of how that son must have felt at thanksgiving, the bitter gets bigger)
And then on a purely personal level, I get bitter because it was thanksgiving week 5 years ago when my stepdad disowned me. I called to see when to come over, and he told me not to bother, we weren't family. We haven't spoken since, and I haven't seen my nieces since. And that still hurts, actually. It makes me even more thankful for the chosen family I get to spend the holiday with, but it still hurts under that.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-30 01:20 am (UTC)I don't mean to downplay the heinousness of that mythology *at all*.
But when people say the holiday has origins in that apocryphal story, that just isn't true. It was tacked on much later.
As far as I know, the original was a national feast of Thanksgiving that a woman asked Lincoln to declare as sort of a thanks for the country being unified again. I am 100% sure it had nothing to do with "pilgrims and Indians". In fact, here is Lincoln's declaration: http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/thanks.htm Everything to do with reconciliation after the civil war, nothing to do with "pilgrims and Indians". So, my recollection was actually correct.
If the Puritans and the Wampanoag had such a feast, it was a small t thanksgiving feast and retconned by assholes into the awful mythology of the holiday.