Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving Day has long been my favorite secular holiday. It has a little bit of everything and something for everyone. It is a seasonal holiday that perfectly captures autumn's spirit. It is a national, patriotic holiday, which invites us to reflect upon our history as a country and on the condition of our current national community (a not particularly pleasant prospect at present). Most of all, it is an especially wonderful celebration of basic human community, 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 Americans  fly or drive or otherwise make their way to whatever counts as "home." In the 2003 film Latter Days, Lila (Jacqueline Bisset) famously welcomes her Thanksgiving Day guests with the 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 in my heart."

Sadly, due in part to some health problems earlier in the fall, I will not be traveling anywhere for Thanksgiving this year. I have family members whom I almost never see. The family members whom I do see, I usually see only once or twice each year. So I treasure those opportunities and will very much miss this one.

Some people purport to be especially anxious about Thanksgiving this year, presumably out of fear of political conflicts erupting around the dinner table. Personally I think it should be considered normal for members of the same family to hold differing political positions. What is actually abnormal rather is only speaking with those people once a year and otherwise living in a way which never exposes one to people with different ideas or attitudes or beliefs. As a society, perhaps we need to be paying more attention to solving both those problems.

All that having been said, Thanksgiving remains our uniquely American holiday, which we should all be able to celebrate together as one nation. So, whether we are at home or traveling over the river and through the wood, Happy Thanksgiving to us all!