Thankfulness is the best tradition

MICHELE MARR

Spicy tofu with lemon grass and fresh basil. A gratin of sweet

potatoes, sweet Italian sausage and Parmesan. Pumpkin-sweet potato

soup with bacon bits. Roast cabbage with grains, caramelized root

vegetables and vegetable coulis -- all this for only 845 calories per

serving.

Sound like your Thanksgiving spread? Mine neither. The San

Francisco Chronicle and Reader’s Digest suggested them. To each his

own.

According to https://www.howstuffworks.com, Thanksgiving’s only

essential tradition is sharing a meal (it doesn’t say what kind) with

family and friends while giving thanks for what we have.

I suspect today there are people all over the country putting that

notion to test -- insisting that the gravy have giblets and the

turkey be carved exactly as it always has been.

As holidays go, according to the website, Thanksgiving is as

simple as one gets, not “tied to any specific religion, and you can

pretty much celebrate it however you want.”

For a lot of families I know and have known, “however you want” is

more like “however you can.” Kind of like the families in the 2000

Thanksgiving classic, “What’s Cooking?”

The movie looks in on four families as each awkwardly gathers

around its cuisine spiced with familial problems. Isabel Avila’s son

invites her husband, with whom she is on rather bad terms, to dinner.

In the Nguyen household, the parents chafe against their children’s

assimilation. The Williams, husband and wife, try to conceal their

domestic turbulence from a visiting in-law. The Seeligs, they are

stubbornly trying not to acknowledge the fact their adult daughter is

living with her lover.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I won’t spoil it for you by telling

you how it all ends. As for Thanksgiving not being tied to any

specific religion, it hasn’t always been seen that way.

One of the enduring memories of my grammar school years is of my

entire class, sometime in the very early ‘60s, reenacting, complete

with Pilgrim and Indian costumes and real food, what I was taught was

our nation’s first Thanksgiving.

The Indians among us wore braids and felt moccasins; they weren’t

allowed to be barefoot at school. The Pilgrims wore black with white

collars and cuffs with silver cardboard buckles on their shoes. The

men also sported buckles on their belts and their black, wide-brimmed

hats. Women tucked their hair under white cotton bonnets.

Our mothers had baked bread to go with bowls of “maize” and winter

squash. Someone’s father gifted us with a hearty lot of venison.

A row of utility tables set end to end, covered with brown craft

paper to mimic wood, served as our banquet table. We stood solemnly

around it, trying to pay attention and remember our parts.

Our teacher told us about the hardships, starvation, illness and

death the Pilgrims suffered the first winter in their new homeland,

losing more than half of their some 100 members. She explained how,

the next winter, the people native to the area -- with their keen

knowledge of indigenous foods -- helped save those who remained.

After she impressed on us the gratitude the Pilgrims -- devoted

Protestants -- felt toward that fall’s good harvest and the natives,

we bowed our heads and prayed just like they would have done, we were

told.

Now we know Pilgrims didn’t always wear black and buckles didn’t

come into vogue until much later in the 17th century. “Plymouth” was

spelled “Plimouth.”

The history and meaning of Thanksgiving is now sometimes taught in

a much different way than it was taught to me. I got a fresh

education when I took a look at some Thanksgiving lesson plans on

Scholastic’s website.

I started with kindergarten; the first year in school I remember

studying the Pilgrims and their 1621 thanks-giving.

Steve Hicks shared his four-week lesson plan that culminates with

a “Kinder-giving Feast,” to which his students’ families are invited

and encouraged to contribute a favorite family dish and its recipe.

Hicks later collected the recipes into a class cookbook.

Until then, his plan was mostly about how “we are all part of a

family,” exploring “the diversity of our origins” and gaining

“historical empathy,” with nary a mention of a Pilgrim.

It focused on how families are affected by many different factors,

including “divorce, adoption, remarriage, ethnic diversity,

grandparents as primary care givers, single parents, foster care,

etc.” and no one kind of family is “better than another” because “all

types of families love and care for each other.”

I was encouraged to find that, at the end, he read the children’s

book “Thanksgiving,” by David F. Marx, with its narrative of

Thanksgiving Day from Plymouth to New York’s Macy’s parade and its

discussion of the holiday’s significance and the value of giving

thanks.

If anything is at all essential to Thanksgiving, it seems to me

it’s giving thanks.

Each year as I count my blessings, a prayer of thanksgiving in the

1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer sums them up well. It offers

thanks to God for “our being, our reason and all other endowments and

faculties of soul and body; for our health, friends, food and

raiment, and all the other comforts and conveniences of life.” I have

bounties to be thankful for.

The same prayer book contains what it calls a “grace before meat,”

a request for God’s blessing before eating a meal: “Give us grateful

hearts, our Father, for all thy mercies and make us mindful of the

needs of others.”

On Thanksgiving and every day.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].