Fanks …

When I arrived in the USA, it was the week before Thanksgiving, and some very kind friends welcomed me to their family Thanksgiving in Boston.  It was quite an evening, and presented below is my first plate of gluttony.  Thanksgiving is quite a unique festival, and seems far more important in American consciousness than any other holiday for many reasons.  Here are some of my own thoughts as to why this holiday captures the imagination:

1. It is an adaptable festival according to the ethnic/religious/cultural tradition of the celebrants

2. It transforms the harvest festival celebration into a homecoming festival for American families (indeed, the first Thanksgiving in Canada was celebrated for the latter reason, the safe return of Martin Frobisher in 1578 after his search for the Northwest passage)

3. It is secular in flavour, even though I have no doubt that there are evocations of divine benevolence in religious households (and a religious connection to harvest festivals)

4. In the popular imagination, Thanksgiving commemorates an event in 1621 where the indigenous Wampanoag tribe assisted the Plymouth colonists by teaching them to fish and providing them seeds for cultivation, thus saving the nascent colony.  One might see an irony in the elevation of this act to the national consciousness whilst generally ignoring the wholesale dispossession, assimilation and genocide of Indigenous American culture and peoples in the 390 years since.  Perhaps that is a little too cynical a view on my part.

5. It is the only 4-day holiday period in the US calendar.  The United States does not observe Boxing Day or the Monday after Easter Sunday.

6. It is the only truly uniquely North American holiday.

So, here’s the food I heaped on my plate – unique to the family Thanksgiving that I attended.  There’s a cranberry jello (to be eaten with main course); turkey and stuffing, zucchini bread, cranberry sauce, apple sauce, sweet potato casserole, green beans.  Many of the foods I had expected to see were not in appearance – the famous green bean casserole (developed by the Campbells Soup Company in the 1950s, a miracle of modern food technology) was absent; there was no Southern touch on the food (no candied yams with marshmallow); and being  Jewish household, obviously no ham.  The desserts are portrayed below – pumpkin pie, chocolate cream pie and apple pie.