Thanksgiving: Finding A New Story

I’ve had a tenuous relationship with Thanksgiving for many years now.  As a college student whose family was overseas, I resented a festival that hammered home the fact that I didn’t have a home to go to.  Several families welcomed me into their homes, but I internalized a message that I was an outsider at their celebrations.  I hadn’t yet learned how to think about accepting the gift of hospitality that these families offered me.  As a young professional who was trying out different lines of liberal thinking, I resented the conspicuous consumption of large quantities of food.  When our first child died in 2004, my resentment turned even stronger.  We should have been celebrating a new baby in our home during Thanksgiving.  Instead we were grieving two dead children and wondering if parenthood was a lost dream.

Kristine has been part of my life through much of this tenuous relationship.  She has born the brunt of many of my critical ponderings about Thanksgiving.  She has allowed me to vent, but also gently tried to help me see Thanksgiving in a more positive light.  For some people it is tied, however incompletely through varied storytelling through the centuries, to a strong sense of national identity.  As one who struggles to call any single place home, I can appreciate that sense of rootedness.  It is a time when people who rarely see each other during the year can get together.  This can be contentious.  But it can also be great fun.  I’ve witnessed how much her extended family truly enjoys each other’s company.  When your language of giving love is to care for your family, preparing a special meal is less about conspicuous consumption then it is showing your children and grandchildren that you care for them.  I am learning to receive those acts of love, even if I wonder why you would ruin a perfectly good apple by putting it into a pie.

The memories of loneliness and pains of grief return every year, but Kristine’s patient encouragement through the years has helped me reach a point of being at peace during Thanksgiving.

2014 has given me a chance to consider Thanksgiving in a different light.  Since we’re in the UK, the girls are in school and I’m at work on Thanksgiving Day.  We’ll spend the weekend in Swindon with the Oldfields, who graciously invited us to help them celebrate a festival that gets very little attention in the UK.  Our Thanksgiving story this year has an awful lot to do with friends like the Oldfields who have opened their lives to a small family that is learning how to live in a foreign land.  Beneath the battles of revisionist historians across the opinionated spectrum, there is a story of giving thanks for people in a foreign land who received help.  That's a story worth celebrating, a story worth telling, and a story worth embodying.  Indeed, it rings out through the Old Testament prophetic tradition: Remember that you were strangers and aliens.  Care for the stranger and the alien among you.

I was a stranger and an alien in the US for many years.  For most of those years, I resented a Thanksgiving festival that reminded me how much I didn't belong.  My family and I are strangers and aliens in the UK this year.  Part of the story is familiar to me: we are celebrating Thanksgiving in a home that is not my own.  But this year the story is different.  I am celebrating Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving 2014 around the table in the Oldfield home