The Blasphemy of Modern Day Thanksgiving

I’ll set the scene: Macy’s at midnight, notorious for its vicious races to extreme discounts, after a sickening meal of poultry and a mush of potatoes. “Quick, grab this, grab that, and wait in line for me! I will be in the stinky restroom painfully excreting the undercooked turkey your mother forced me to eat.” 

Some centuries ago, after the colonizers moved past their superiority complexes and the Indigenous people taught the unskillful British how to farm, Pilgrims and Native Americans allegedly convened. Now we have a parade with balloons and stuff our faces with, well, stuffing to celebrate a commercial national holiday.

So, what’s the tradition? Families reunite to be connected over their traditional dishes and hold hands, give grace, and share their gratitude. There’s the Macy’s parade, followed by testosterone overloads watching football games and chugging Coronas (light, of course). Then, following the disgustingly fattening meal comes the annual abomination of Black Friday, an excuse for major corporations to empty our wallets. But what's the reality? Marketing is rooted in the history of Americans commercializing Thanksgiving. But wait, let's backtrack. I’ll tell you the whole story. 

Apparently English settlers weren’t even the first to celebrate a Thanksgiving feast. In 1540, Spanish explorer, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, left Mexico City, Mexico, on the hunt for gold. He and his company celebrated a feast of prayer and thanksgiving in 1541. So...79 years before Plymouth?! ¡Ay Dios Mio! Eventually, like we’ve been told, Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag Native Americans shared a feast in 1621. But some historians claim that in 1607 the Spanish founders of St. Augustine, Florida shared a feast with the native Timucuan people and elsewhere, at the same time, English colonists and the Abenaki Native Americans convened as well. Basically, there was interracial friendship, so now I have sweat buckets in a dangerously hot kitchen basting and squirting oil up a dead bird. 

Jump to 1863, Abraham Lincoln (the four scores something years ago guy), proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday. To a country torn apart by the Civil War, he officially made the last Thursday of November Thanksgiving. In 1876, there was the first Thanksgiving football game. It was played between Princeton and Yale, and this tradition quickly caught on. In fact, by 1893, 40,000 people came to watch the game in New York’s Manhattan field (what were Jersey and Connecticut people even doing here?) and the kegs and shotguns came shortly after. The next major Thanksgiving staple came in 1924 with the first Macy’s parade. This was truly a circus in the beginning, as it started with live elephants and camels from the Central Park Zoo. Later on, Franklin Roosevelt changed Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November. 

But let's move on from history. Y’all will never believe what I got from Amazon this past weekend: Pumpkin Spiced Poo Pourri. My roommate was horrified when I opened that package and requested that I return it immediately– she did not want the toilet smelling like pie. Why on earth does this product even exist? Enter: the phenomenon of Thanksgiving marketing. Advertising for the holiday typically focuses on two things: Thanksgiving related items and Thanksgiving themed items. So Pilgrims ate pumpkin a few centuries ago and now some company wants me to spray pumpkin spice scents into the restroom? They just want our money! Seriously, thousands, probably millions, of Americans fall into the trap of commercialized traditions (I guess I did, too). We pour our savings into major corporations that simply seek to capitalize on holiday spirit for profit. 

Now, another thing: what even is Black Friday? I just blindly follow my best friend as we get lost in mall stampedes trying to find steals and deals in our favorite department stores (just to grab some overpriced makeup that has become slightly less overpriced). Shockingly, the first recorded use of the term “Black Friday” was applied to the financial crisis of September 24th, 1869, when the United States gold market crashed (courtesy of real-life wolves of wall street, a story for another time). Now, Black Friday indicates when stores move out of the red (profit losses) to black (profit gains) after the absurd amount of post-Thanksgiving sales. American consumerism has become such an inherent part of our culture and identity that we quite literally leap out of bed to participate in this commercialized shopping frenzy. 

I have my skepticisms about Thanksgiving, and I think it is important to criticize its origin and application to covert racism. The age-old Native American feather headpieces, Pilgrim top Kindergarten activities, and supposed gratuitous gathering that is told from the colonizer’s point of view are some of the many flaws to this national holiday. But I’ll be real– just like capitalism and consumerism have commercialized these traditions, the meaning and values of Thanksgiving have developed over time to focus on gratitude and family, as opposed to novel intercultural connections. I will never pass up on an opportunity for my loved ones to convene over a well-deserved meal, and I do leap out of bed to rush to stores for all my Christmas shopping. So, what are you doing this Thanksgiving? Your Aunt’s famous green beans, the game with a White Claw (let’s say no to the beer belly), a tasteful viewing of the Macy’s parade, and, finally, a race to the finish line of your local Nike store? Sounds like a plan to me.