It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor.
— George Washington, Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1789
Another holiday, another opportunity for me to be the old fuddy-duddy (who still uses expressions like “fuddy-duddy”) and rain all over the most mundane and trivial parades I can find. If only you, dear reader, were as cynical as I am, you’d know that the best way to enjoy anything is to first enjoy nothing at all. After all, you’ll never get the real thing if you aren’t first discontent with phoniness. And I am thoroughly discontent with phoniness around Thanksgiving. Particularly, as the flirting-with-bait title suggests, if I hear one more person call the holiday “Turkey Day,” I’m liable to suffer a disproportionately severe cardiac event.
“But, Garrett,” I can already hear you interrupting, quite rudely, “It’s just a silly little bla bla bla… making a mountain out of a bla bla…” Well if you’d kindly let me finish, I’d tell you that silly little bla bla’s often reveal a lot more than they pretend to. Being much obliged that you are listening more politely now, seeing as this is my show to run and whatnot, I suppose I should explain the positive first, that being the importance of Thanksgiving. Cynicism isn’t supposed to be bottomless, you know. To be worthwhile it must always seek to retrieve some gold from the riverbed, pearls from the seafloor. “The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it,” as C.S. Lewis put it.
You probably remember the story from fifth grade or thereabouts. You may even have dressed up in a funny big black hat or a now less-than-politically-acceptable feathered headband as you recited lines about racial unity and religious liberty to your classmates. These themes are fine, but, as I hope to demonstrate, like so many good things they become a distraction from the point. We’re apt to carry with us into adulthood only the unimportant details of important cultural memories. Children represent in caricature the broader inability of mankind to align that which takes our notice and that which should. Look at the Old Testament and the back-and-forth forgetfulness of Israel and commands from God to memorialize His works. The need to remember divine providence cannot be overstated with respect to our overwhelming ability to forget it and return to our illusions of self-sufficiency.
“Do not move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set,” the Proverbs tell us. Our culture is very averse to ancient landmarks for a number of reasons, but the English Separatists that we call the Pilgrims who inhabited Plymouth, Massachusetts understood that their very survival depended upon the whims of the Almighty. Seeing as their survival was a tenuous but nonetheless realized prospect, they instituted Thanksgiving as a communal celebration of the abundant harvest that God, in no small part through the charity of the Wampanoag, had brought to them from the soil of the New World. Historians debate the historicity of this first Thanksgiving because they don’t know what tradition is for. At some level, it doesn’t matter if this event actually happened. It’s a good story, and an important one, whether or not it is mere folklore.
If you are reading this, you are alive. If you are alive, that means you’ve had your needs met: your safety, nutrition, and shelter, among others. If you’ve had your needs met, it’s because God deemed it should be so. So, the Thanksgiving story, if not a historical one, is a true one. The Lord provides, and because He’s provided for you and your ancestors for uncountable generations, you are alive. What a thing to be thankful for, indeed! What a miracle it is that enough events converged, enough stars aligned by the sheer whim and will of God that you could be here on this earth today, eating good food, making good friends, having good times.
Here, we start to arrive at the problems, though. Americans increasingly believe that thankfulness doesn’t require an object, that you don’t have to thank anyone, you can simply “be thankful.” That’s like saying you don’t have to eat anything, you can just “eat.” Gratitude always has an object. If God isn’t real, or is uninvolved in our lives, then life isn’t something one can “be thankful” for, it simply is. We can truly call this absurdity a post-Christian notion, like secular culture’s idea of “faith” as being a good thing even without an object. These things sound nice to secular people — because these things are nice — but they are only good because they have God as their object.
So, the corny names for Thanksgiving emerge because the holiday ceases to be about a concrete story, any solemn remembrance, ceases to have any real object at all except warm, cozy feelings. I like being warm and cozy as much as anyone, but to feel literally warm without a fire is delusion, and to feel emotionally warm without a substantive reason is the same. People want to “be thankful” in a vague sense because if we can give thanks to God, we have a responsibility to. Responsibility? Yuck! There goes that warm and cozy feeling.
In the face of this detachment, the name “Friendsgiving” attempts to recover meaning by attaching it to the gathering of friends — again, not in itself a bad thing — but the holiday isn’t about “giving friends.” It’s a silly nonsense word that supplants what’s important about the holiday, its namesake, giving thanks (go figure). “Friendsgiving,” mind you, as opposed to anything to do with family, because we get to choose friends, making the holiday even more egocentric. The stereotype is, after all, that Thanksgiving is a time of incredible social discomfort with undesirable family members, especially the sort of offensive uncle trope. You know the one. It’s much easier to surround oneself with people one solely agrees with, but this is hardly the basis of meaningful friendship.
The even cornier and even more repugnant “Turkey Day” takes this to an extreme that is as vapid as it is silly. The holiday is truly even less about turkey than it is about friends! Using this patently ridiculous and incomparably shallow name, even in jest, reveals what our culture truly values about the holiday: consumption, plain and trivial. Why else would people be so eager to get it over with and skip to Christmas? This year, I must have seen at least ten times more media and advertising devoted to Black Friday than anything celebrating Thanksgiving. Christmas decorations infamously go up weeks before Thanksgiving decor is even on clearance at stores, if the latter even goes up at all. Black Friday is the overturning of Thanksgiving with the secular underbelly of Christmas, which without an actual celebration of Christ is mostly just the most powerful marketing tool on the calendar, because it’s made to be about getting rather than giving.
I know this probably sounds more invective and polemical than is warranted by goofy joke names for Thanksgiving. But it’s not about the names, it’s about what they mean, why they crop up in the first place. They betray a broad cultural disregard for tradition and a desire to disconnect our enjoyment of life from accountability to God or the past. “Friendsgiving” gets to be about the people I like and who like me, and “Turkey Day” gets to be about tasty food — both are abuses of good things to serve self. Historical narratives about the first Thanksgiving are politicized and dismantled because some modern minds cannot comprehend that anything good ever came from the past. We who are in Christ know better, that though the future holds unimaginable promise, that promise is hopeful because the greatest events in history so far have taken place about two millennia ago and, by the Spirit’s will, been carried down through history to us.
And here, if you’ve borne with me, we reach the bottom of cynicism and see it pay off as we bubble back up to the surface. There is nothing new under the sun. The world will always get good things wrong, but the truth of such things will always remain good. Psalm 104 tells that God is the One who provides “wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine and bread to strengthen man’s heart.” Thanksgiving, despite the anti-tradition and anti-culture of our age, endures as a truly beautiful and joyful time in its capacity to orient us toward deeper faith in God and deeper love for Him and all who bear His image. Enjoy it with family, enjoy it with friends, enjoy it with food. My intent is not at all to say friends and turkey are bad, just to say, don’t lose the plot. Don’t forget the story. Don’t move the ancient landmark.
Many peoples have come to and inhabited America, but we have historically counted the Pilgrims as our national forebears for good reason. They exercised the freedom they found on this continent to honor their Lord with thanks. That same God has provided all that you and I need today, not least the chance to be made right with Him through Jesus Christ. Whatever you do, whatever you enjoy, enjoy it to the glory of the One who gave it. If you really can’t help yourself from calling the holiday silly names, I implore you at least not to think of it as “Turkey Day.” Think of it as what it is, a day to pause, taste and see that the Lord is good, and give Him all we can of the honor He deserves for it.
God is so good, so wonderful to us. His love for us, revealed in Jesus Christ, makes life eternal, abundant, worth living. “We love because He first loved us.” All that is in this world is His anyway, so we offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving, our very selves as living sacrifices. Thanksgiving Day is a day to count our many blessings, though we find they are too many to count. We thank Him not only for the good things, but for the difficult things as well, knowing that because He first suffered for us, all that we suffer is not aimless but aimed at holiness, at His glory, so long as our faith is in Him and His Spirit in us. “For those who love God all things work together for good,” and, “This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” That’s true of every day, every thing that passes through the lives of those whose faith is in Christ. Thanksgiving should therefore be a pattern rather than just an occasion, but need we any more reason to make it an occasion?
Have a happy and blessed Thanksgiving, and as you take stock of your life, may God’s goodness and glory be the thing that shines brightest to your heart!
Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High: And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me. — Psalm 50:14-15 (KJV)
Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. — Ecclesiastes 9:7-8 (KJV)
Being Kindled 
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