Home for the Holidays

 

In the 2003 film Latter Days, Lila (Jacqueline Bisset), welcomes her Thanksgiving Day guests with these words: "I want you to know that wherever we find ourselves in this world, whatever our successes or failures, come this time of year, you will always have a place at my table and a place enemy heart."

Thanksgiving Day has always been - and remains - my favorite secular holiday. It perfectly captures the autumn season's spirit and invites us (whether or not we chose to respond) to reflect upon our history as a nation and on the condition of our current national community (a not particuarly pleasant prospect at present). But, most of all, it is an especially beautiful time for basic human community, that of family and friends gathered around the table of God's and nature's bounty and the results of human labor. Hence the crowded airports and highways all this week, as from one coast to the other we fly or drive or otherwise make our way to whatever counts as "home." 

Deep in my treasury of childhood holiday memories is Perry Como's annual Thanksgiving TV show, which always began with this silly song:

Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays
'Cause no matter how far away you roam
When you pine for the sunshine of a friendly gaze
For the holidays, you can't beat home sweet home

I met a man who lives in Tennessee, and he was heading for
Pennsylvania and some homemade pumpkin pie
From Pennsylvania folks are travellin'
Down to Dixie's sunny shore
From Atlantic to Pacific
Gee, the traffic is terrific

Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays
'Cause no matter how far away you roam
If you want to be happy in a million ways
For the holidays, you can't beat home sweet home

(When you pine for the sunshine of a friendly gaze

I met a man who lives in Tennessee, and he was heading for
Pennsylvania and some homemade pumpkin pie
From Pennsylvania folks are travellin'
Down to Dixie's sunny shore
From Atlantic to Pacific
Gee, the traffic is terrific

Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays
'Cause no matter how far away you roam
If you want to be happy in a million ways
For the holidays, you can't beat home sweet home

For the holidays, you can't beat home sweet home

[Source: Musixmatch. Songwriters: Al Stillman / Robert Allen. (There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays lyrics © Kassner Associated Publishers Ltd., Music Sales Corp., Charlie Deitcher Productions Inc., Kitty Anne Music, Charlie Deitcher. Productions Inc, Kitty-anne Music, Kitty Anne Music Co. Inc.]

"Home" for many Americans in our mobile and disconnected society may increasingly seem a somewhat elusive concept, endlessly redefined as needed. For many of us in today's fractured mobile society, "home" here may refer less to some particular place than to particular people, often family (if we are lucky enough to have family) or some constellation of people (if we are fortunate enough to have friends) who have become a substitute for family.

For Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), who was an abolitionist, an activist for both women's and Native American rights, and an opponent of American expansion, as well as a journalist and the author of the familiar 1844 poem we all learned long ago in school, The New-England Boy's Song about Thanksgiving Day, "home for the holidays" was a traditional New England family house kept by Grandfather and Grandmother who made everyone feel at home. 

Over the river and through the wood,
To Grandfather's house we go;
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
Through the white and drifted snow.

Over the river and through the woods,
To Grandfather's house away!
We would not stop for doll or top,
For 'tis Thanksgiving Day.

Over the river and through the woods,
Oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes and bites the nose
As over the ground we go.

Over the river and through the woods,
And straight through the barnyard gate;
We seem to go extremely slow,
It is so hard to wait!

Believe it or not, the full poem has another 8 stanzas! But I think we've gotten the point by now - that it takes some effort and can be a challenge to get home for Thanksgiving, but that it is obviously well worth it! 

For many today, "home" might be a local church's "Thanksgiving Dinner" for seniors, creating at least a temporary "home" where none any longer exists, for those for whom the need to share a turkey with family, with friends, with someone remains deeply rooted. And, if those examples are but two ends of the Thanksgiving Dinner spectrum, there are a lot of traditional and innovative versions of "home" in-between. 

More than any other secular holiday, Thanksgiving follows the ancient, apparently universal human model of a ritual meal, which connects the domestic dimension with the civic celebration. We all need to eat. Indeed (as in the resurrection appearance of Jesus in Luke 24:41-42) our ability to eat also shows we are really alive. And, because we are social and political animals, we need to eat together. Our meals, whether alone or with others, reflect our dependence on the fruits of God's creation and ritualize our dependence on the world from which we are inseparable. Our shared meals highlight our dependence on one another and ritualize our common aspiration for what the ancients understood as the good life. Our festive Thanksgiving holiday dinner is all of that, contextualized by our shared history of family (those immediately gathered at the turkey table and our memories of those who gathered at that table with us in the past) and a particular national community, whose origins and aspirations are mythologized and ritualized in this annual observance, which links us with our fellow citizens across space and time. A nation is found, first of all, in its shared history. With its historically prescribed festive menu, Thanksgiving connects our national past with our immediate present of families and friends.

As such, Thanksgiving Day has been most associated in American history and national mythology with the 17th-century colonial experience. Thanksgiving’s narrative of American religion has regularly privileged New England Protestantism and its historical variants over other American religious experiences, as in general the traditional U.S. founding narratives typically privilege the influence of New England over the French and Spanish settlements and even over the other English colonies with different variants of Protestantism. 

Thus, in his last Thanksgiving proclamation, 60 years ago, in 1963, President John F. Kennedy recalled the predominant New England tradition (along with that of alternative colonial claimants): "Over three centuries ago, our forefathers in Virginia and in Massachusetts, far from home in a lonely wilderness, set aside a time of thanksgiving. On the appointed day, they gave reverent thanks for their safety, for the health of their children, for the fertility of their fields, for the love which bound them together, and for the faith which united them with their God."

These ideals are intrinsic to the symbolism of this celebration, as is Jonathan Winthrop's familiar invocation in his 1630 sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” of the New Testament image of a city upon a hill - invoked not (as it has since sometimes been invoked) in a spirit of self-congratulation, but as a challenge to become an authentic moral community:

For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

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To hear Perry Como's rendition of There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays, go to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2aoEd3oakE&list=RDi2aoEd3oakE&start_radio=1&t=130s