
I have struggled with the celebration of Thanksgiving my whole life. When I was young, I couldn’t understand why I felt the way I felt. I just did. To me, the holiday always felt
wildly inappropriate. In another generation, I wonder if a little girl might have felt similarly at picnic with her family at a public lynching. I felt as if I were being asked to silently go along with a script in a play that’s plotline was actually quite gruesome and violent. Over the years, I have tried to express how I felt and got summarily dismissed, told I was “missing the point”, didn’t understand what the holiday was
really about, and that I was dragging everyone down.
Every year, I watched people I loved celebrate the gluttony of our society unabashedly take center stage as the Macy’s parade of consumerism took over 5
th Avenue, not understanding the compulsion to retire to couches to yell at the television as grown men beat the shit out of each other for our entertainment. Every year I got shamed into silence, bullied into conformity, and mocked for my apparent grasp of our nation’s history. I learned to mute myself, like how I trained myself to swim the length of an Olympic-sized pool underwater with just one breath, I held it in because it was just one day a year.
What I realize now is that my feelings about Thanksgiving weren’t unfounded, they were unpopular. No wonder I was silenced and shunned. What I realize now is that my feelings told me that it was fundamentally wrong to celebrate the genocide of indigenous people on an annual basis and call it a national holiday. No wonder indigenous people don’t tend to celebrate the holiday. What my feelings told me was this holiday was a grotesque mask that covered an ugly narrative about this country and the culture of white supremacy baked into it. No wonder I never had an appetite. No wonder a big part of me breathed a sigh of relief that a global pandemic would put a damper on the holiday for 2020. If only for a year.
Want to know what these daily verses are all about? Read here to learn what inspired this practice on my birthday post, November 1st.