THE BELL CURVE:

The most difficult days in the year to write a column are Thanksgiving and Christmas — and I drew both of them this year. Difficult because the cliches have often become the realities on these special days, and the effort to come up with something fresh can make the clichés seem downright profound. The only columnist I’ve ever read who avoided this trap year after year was Art Buchwald.

For more years than I can remember, I have looked forward to Buchwald’s Thanksgiving column. Even though I could have recited most of it from memory, it has never failed to delight me anew.

Buchwald spent almost six decades writing wonderfully funny columns with bite beneath the laughs. His original base was the Paris International Herald Tribune, but his reach was the world. And his humor, very American, was sometimes unintelligible to foreigners. That’s what inspired his first Thanksgiving column, which set out to explain this very American holiday to the French. As a timeless classic, that column has been repeated verbatim every year since.

If it runs this Thanksgiving, it will be posthumously. Buchwald died a week after the holidays in January 2007, after refusing dialysis for his failing kidneys, then confounding his doctors by living for a year after they told him he only had a few weeks. Characteristically, he spent that year holding court, writing a book — his 31st — about laughing at death and telling his friends who came to offer comfort: “I’m having a swell time. The best time of my life.�

It might have been a patch funnier if he had been around to offer his spin on a controversy currently taking place over a traditional Thanksgiving play in Claremont. For decades, kindergartners in two local public schools there, dressed as pilgrims and Native Americans, have exchanged roles every other year to put on the traditional rendition of our first Thanksgiving. While my generation at 5 years of age was into cowboys and Indians, kids in Claremont have played their version by setting aside differences and sharing an autumn harvest banquet of thanks. And parents of some of the kids are raising hell over the implications of the message.

Leading the charge is an English professor at UC Riverside whose mother is a Seneca, and who specializes in Native American literature. In an interview with a Los Angeles Times reporter, she compared the pilgrims and Native Americans as portrayed in the school play to slaves and masters and Jews and Nazis, and condemned the play as dealing in “racist stereotypes.�

As inevitably happens in the backwash of such rhetoric, the school’s parents are now choosing up sides and the district administrators are looking for ways to cool it down amid hate mail and threats. When the district floated a rumor that it might cancel the event, the parents who regarded this as overkill and cowardice showed up at a heated school board meeting that led finally to a decision that the play would go on but without the conventional costumes that defined the actors. And when some of the kids showed up in costume anyway for Tuesday’s performance, it played that way and probably ruined the appetites around some Thanksgiving tables.

I’m not sure what the lesson here is. Like so many of our national legends, the story of our first Thanksgiving is part history, part myth and part to absolve our guilt at the treatment of our Native American forebears. The love feast we celebrate, for example, probably wasn’t the first of its kind and wasn’t initiated by a grateful band of British tourists but rather by a war party of Indians investigating a gunshot sound and finding a thanksgiving dinner party of pilgrims instead. The party was distressingly short of meat, so an Indian hunting party was sent out by the chief and returned with four deer and a ton of turkeys that crowned the celebration of plenty. And this Native American version may be closer to the truth.

Every culture lives by its myths as well as its history, and sometimes they are impossible to separate. And of equal importance. The history lesson will come later. The kids in Claremont were playing the myth and getting a sense of the satisfaction to be found in sharing their substance — whatever it might be — with other cultures. That’s a pretty good lesson for kindergartners. A lot of much older people haven’t learned it yet. Some of them were facing off Tuesday while the kids — some still in costume — were playing together in the schoolyard.

As our comfort level on this Thanksgiving disintegrates with each new crisis, he might even have somehow turned around the rhetorical question that has become a national mantra: What is there to be thankful for in this looming disaster we face today?

Cliches won’t work here. But the strength and intelligence and determination that has carried us through worse crises will. That might be a thought to ponder around our Thanksgiving tables.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.