For most Americans this isn't the Thanksgiving that many wanted or expected. Like most of our modern holidays Thanksgiving has become about excess and materialism. It's about eating and drinking yourself to a stupor, lying on the couch watching football until you can go shop on Black Friday. The original meaning of Thanksgiving though was far from it. It was about a group of immigrants fleeing religious persecution facing starvation and death along the shores of a hostile continent. It wasn't a celebration of excess but a celebration of being alive and having a good chance of making it through the winter. Survival was only possible because the generosity of the indigenous people who looked upon that fragile colony of strangers not as invaders but with pity and common humanity. If not for the generosity of Wampanoag Tribe the Plymouth colony might've disappeared into history as much the Jamestown colony and other failed European colonies had. The original Thanksgiving wasn't a celebration of gluttony or materialism, or even family. It was a celebration of survival. Now as we deal with a pandemic that is killing and sickening hundreds of thousands of Americans we should remember the struggle and hardship that the Plymouth colony went through. At a time when we are divided along our own political and cultural lines remember that survival was only possible through coming together of very different people.
It's that time a year when the fake story about how turkey almost became the national bird of the US pops back up. Though the story about turkey being the runner up is complete BS, I think we can still learn a lesson from it anyway by pretending it's true. That stellar life lesson is, much like Ricky Bobby's dad once taught him, "yer first or yer last". When's the last time anyone ate an Eagle? So this Thanksgiving, enjoy the time with your family and friends (unless you are too scared of the COVID, in which case, try to enjoy your self imposed isolation), but always remember that no matter what you need to stay on your grind or you'll get eaten.
The story that Franklin proposed the turkey as the national symbol began to circulate in American newspapers around the time of the country’s centennial and are based on a January 26, 1784, letter in which he panned the eagle and extolled the virtues of the gobbler to his daughter, Sarah. In doing so, though, he was not delivering a critique of the Great Seal but a new medal issued by the Society of the Cincinnati, an association of Continental Army veterans. “For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country,” he wrote. The Founding Father argued that the eagle was “a bird of bad moral character” that “does not get his living honestly” because it steals food from the fishing hawk and is “too lazy to fish for himself.” In contrast, Franklin called the turkey “a much more respectable bird” and “a true original native of America.” While he considered the eagle “a rank coward,” Franklin believed the turkey to be “a bird of courage” that “would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.” While the private letter was a spirited promotion of the turkey over the eagle, Franklin never made his views public, and when the chance had been given to him to officially propose a symbol for the United States eight years earlier, his idea was biblical, not avian. This is all very serious, of course, but I will say that the wild turkey is a badass bird.
Google that and tell me what you come up with “Giving Thanks” Happy belated Thanksgiving clutch fans!
