They say you should be thankful on Thanksgiving. Thankful for what exactly? My family were not early settlers of the new land. We were still in Scotland fending off the English. Should I feel thankful that the English screwed over another race of people? The English got around for sure. They did a number on the Scots, the Indians, France, and of course the native Americans who were so kind to show them how not to die that they repaid them by slaughtering and moving them from their own lands and later introducing racism in order to keep them down.
How sweet of them right? Then the anglosaxtons helped again didn’t they? It probably went something like this, “Hey, build casinos. That will keep your people and traditions alive.”
“Thank you for showing us the honky ways.”
Thanksgiving is not all grandma baking a pumpkin pie and grandpa cussing out the turkey for coming out dry. We all know this stuff by now. There is an understanding that Thanksgiving is a little more American psycho than a Rockefeller painting.
What keeps us coming back for helpings of dry turkey, can molded cranberries, and those weird yams?
October 3rd, 1863, then President Abe Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. He made it a national holiday on November 26th. Before then there was a tradition in Massachusetts where they would celebrate by inviting the local Wampanoag tribe to join in a festival. They would show their gratitude for the crop that season. That was done in 1621 by the Plymouth governor, William Bradford.
The idea of the holiday was really taking off by 1789. We have to thank George “Cherry Tree” Washington for becoming the first President to declare Thanksgiving a holiday. Then of course, like I said, Lincoln was the one who made it a national holiday to be celebrated on November 26th.
For many years the people happily fed their fat faces on the 26th until President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) decided to change the glutinous holiday to the fourth Thursday of November in 1941.
All this is fine. I’m not trying to bust anybody’s cranberry bags. I take no issue with stuffing my face full of delicious smoked turkey and stuffing. The fact is that everybody should know how and what started this very American tradition.
People should know the good, the bad, and the genocidal.
What we should do is celebrate this fine tradition. But this year, when you are giving a little prayer or going around the table telling your family that you are thankful for your family for the 32nd Thanks-fucking-giving in a row; maybe lay down some thanks to those natives that selflessly helped those pasty bastards all those years ago so they wouldn’t die from starvation and VD from their secret love affairs with the Pilgrim Priest. I’d just assume they weren’t much different from the Catholic priests.
All I really want is my fucking turkey leg. Happy Thanksgiving everybody.