An American Holiday (From Hereford Times)

An American Holiday

7:37am Wednesday 22nd November 2006

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Thursday this week an American holiday takes place. It’s Thanksgiving. It is always held the fourth Thursday in November. I’ve been told the British equivalent takes place in church and is called the Harvest Festival.

As a child I was taught in school that this was first held in Colonial America to celebrate the first harvest. Both the pilgrims and the American Indians met together to share the fruits of the harvest in a mutual meal. That would have been the last meal where they sat down together since not long after that we started taking their land and shoving them on to reservations. Somehow that didn’t make for much of a good neighbour policy.

As time has passed, Thanksgiving slowly evolved to what it is today. In Norman Rockwell’s America, families gather for roast turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes, candied sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie for dessert. Everyone helps to prepare the meal by bringing something, everyone gets along, the children do not bicker and while the men folk doze by the fire the women gossip over the washing up. Note: I did say Norman Rockwell’s America (American painter famous for his tender family scenes.)

That might have been Thanksgiving 1953 but now the Christmas decorations start showing up in the stores before the Halloween sweets have been passed out to the kiddies. Thanksgiving is still celebrated with the ceremonial gorging but the kids are probably arguing over which video games to play with their cousins and while the dads are parked on the sofa, beer in hand watching as much American football as they can possibly cram in during one weekend, the wives are in the kitchen planning their shopping strategy for the next day.

The ads on the telly during the breaks are full of news about stores that are going to open at 5:00 A.M. on Friday morning and the special deals that the first 100 shoppers through the door will get that as SO super spectacular that there will actually be shoppers waiting outside the doors for hours before the stores open to get the first crack at the goodies. And it isn’t just one store that does this, it’s ALL of them. The newspaper delivered on Thanksgiving Day is 99.5% sale ads with just a teensy weensy bit of news squeezed in between the offers. It is a well known fact that the day after Thanksgiving in America is the absolute biggest sales day of the year. In fact in recent years, there are stores that even stay open on Thanksgiving, what amounts to a Bank Holiday here, so that you can get a jump start on the crowds. The Friday after Thanksgiving in America is known to retailers as ‘Black Friday’, it’s the day when their profits going from being in the red to a firm spot in the black. Employees of said retailers may think Black Friday is code for ‘Oh NO, it’s Christmas again!!’

The 6:00 news on Friday will be filled with overhead shots of mall car parks that are so full that when you come out of the stores with your parcels, people in their cars will actually stalk you for your parking place. Imagine their disappointment when they find you are only emptying your arms to go back for still more!

All this is posted very tongue in cheek. . .I do miss Thanksgiving, getting together with family and the shared meal. I do NOT miss three solid days of football or the traffic jams around the shops. In fact I used to spurn the sales in protest of the comercilisation of the whole holiday season. That’s not to say I didn’t buy pressies, I just didn’t join the mobs on the day after Thanksgiving. And why is it people behave so badly when faced with a queue of other shoppers? I’ve been behind folks that just need a good slapping for the way they treat the person at the till.

Sadly on the day I feel like my family is having a party but forget to invite me. Of course not the case at all as they will all call and some point during the day. I did try to make a Thanksgiving dinner one year here and invited neighbours but at the end of the day they really didn’t know what to make of the sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie.

This year it’s a turkey crown already stuffed and ready to cook . . .no pumpkin pie, no sweet potatoes. I will be singing a song from my youth in my head “over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go. . . .the horse knows the way to