bittersweet

[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.

Comments

[trinker]

*hug* offered.

[eriktrips]

I find the mythology behind the holiday hard to come to grips with myself. I mean, the mythology is obviously made up, and the history is there for anyone who wants to read it, but many people I know try either to do Thanksgiving "ironically" or to resuscitate it by saying it is a "time to reflect." But if we were to reflect honestly I don't think we could be so bland about what the day is supposed to celebrate.

So I am trying not to. Celebrate, that is. I don't think it is a holiday worth reclaiming under some ecumenical ideal that we are still centuries away from achieving culturally and I don't trust irony not to reinscribe the original offense.

Still, it is hard to try to have a "normal" day. The familial crap is always its own problem and impossible to sidestep it seems. I wish that we did not have to inflict this on ourselves so regularly.

I hope you have a good day with your chosen family.

[jesse_the_k]

+1.

I am too chicken shit to challenge the oldest generation who expect to celebrate the holiday. When they're gone, I'll be done.

Very best wishes to you and yours.

[jesse_the_k]

And then I encountered this excellent essay fromhaddyr:,

begin quote  Immigrants arrive here for reasons different from those that drove the Pilgrims, fleeing different problems, facing a different future. They are not conquerors with a theology of Manifest Destiny, greeting plagues as a sign from God that they are meant to snatch the land away from those who already live here.

Instead of gifting us with smallpox-infected blankets, for instance, the Mexican immigrants in my neighborhood revitalized East Lake Street with solid locally owned businesses and a vibrant, family-focused culture. Instead of yanking me from my home and forcing me to march at gunpoint across the Mississippi, when my Somali neighbors moved in down the street they introduced themselves and we chatted about Montessori education. My Hmong- and Laotian-American friends, instead of taking me from my parents' home and making me eat rocks whenever I spoke my native language, invite me to their baby showers and poetry readings.
 quote ends

[sophygurl]

It's unfair that family can hurt us so much. Glad you have a good chosen family, but it doesn't make the other part hurt less, I know.

[djkittycat]

You are absolutely correct! It *is* made up, and in fact is *not the original meaning of the holiday whatsoever*.

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.