An oven in which to roast the beast

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A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE 

It’s time to belly up to the dinner table and tuck in to a giant feast of roast beast and a hearty helping of pulpy veggies.

I hope your gravy is lumpless, your cranberry sauce perky, your yams creamy and your pie foamy. I hope you are satisfied.

More than anything, though, I hope you are thankful.

That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? We are supposed to come together as families, friends and loved ones, cherish each other’s company, delight in seeing those who’ve come from far away, and take pleasure in sharing a meal that honestly wouldn’t be possible to have if we were suffering. 

We are fortunate to live in a country of plenty, and we sometimes forget that it is only because generations before ours fought through extraordinary hardships to establish the homesteads in which we all come together on this day.

We are also fortunate and should be thankful that most of us have jobs and cars, that we can afford bicycles and video games for our children, that we can wear clothes without holes in them and that our homes are safe and warm.

In the modern world, it’s the simple things that should matter because they are what we have built our families on, what we sometimes take for granted because we haven’t had to suffer as much as our forefathers, and that we have come to expect as the foundations of a stable life.

Certainly, we don’t all need to buy expensive things for our children, and we don’t have to have the fastest cars, but with each passing generation the baseline for convincing ourselves we have succeeded as Americans has risen ever higher. Gone are the days when everyone would simply be thankful for indoor plumbing or an oven in which to roast the beast, and gone are the generations that worked hard for those simple things.                 

If things were suddenly to change, and if our fortunes were to plummet, our comforts taken away and our basic necessities hard to come by, perhaps we’d forsake the family gathering and sit alone in our misery. Why? Because we have associated Thanksgiving with luxuries and we’ve come to believe that demonstrating our material values to each other is central to this feast.

Frankly, I think that’s terribly wrong.

Having grown up in a country that doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving (after all, the Pilgrims left England to come here), the calendars of my childhood and adolescence were not dotted with the same landmarks as yours. We also didn’t celebrate the Fourth of July (do I need to explain this?), another of those great events for which families and neighbors join hands, and so the days on which we all sat down at table together were limited to Christmas and Easter.

We did, however, celebrate the Harvest Festival at around this time of year, and our little churches were filled with the crops that we’d grown in our tiny gardens or plucked from our orchards. All along the pews and window ledges there would be grotesquely misshapen vegetables, floppy-leafed things and tumbles of pale fruits, and it was for these meager harvests that we would be thankful because they meant more to us than a bite to eat. We’d go home through the autumn air, grateful once again to have shared another season, survived another year together, walked along life’s road side by side… And when the time came to break bread together, we’d not have to say out loud that these little things were the essentials that we appreciated. We’d simply know it in our hearts.

Our gravy may have been dreadfully lumpy, but it didn’t matter.

Similarly, it doesn’t matter what car you drive or what your little telephone can do. What matters is that you look your loved ones in the eye and show them that you care they’re alright and that you’re glad they’re with you today.