Thanksgiving 2007

These are turkeys, living in the wilds of Madison County, North Carolina. They are bold turkeys, brazen, passing through my mother-in-law's yard on Thanksgiving day 2003. I was outside, needing to stand up after the meal I'd just consumed, including turkey, and I was impressed with their up-yours-not-mine attitude.

It's 8:15 a.m. on Thanksgiving 2007, a mere 386 years after the gathering in Plymouth that I wrote about yesterday. Compare their preparation and celebration to mine.

I've been neither fishing nor fowling. My land grows only grass--no Indian corn or vegetables or fruits of any kind. These I can purchase in a big well-lighted air-conditioned building just three miles away. (Usually when I go there, I eat at the Mexican restaurant next door first so that I'm not shopping hungry.) But because my family and I are to be familiar guests of somebody else today, I've done no harvesting of any kind (in addition to neither fishing nor fowling).

When I finish writing this, if it's not too cold, I'll walk three miles or so (not related to the aforementioned three miles' distance to the grocery store). This walk won't be through lush virgin forest but in a nearby park, to which I'll drive first. Then I'll come home and take a shower, get the wife and son in the car and drive across the mountain into North Carolina.

First stop: my mother-in-law's house in Marshall for a family meal at noon, where we'll eat and lounge around in front of the television. After about three and a half hours of this, we'll leave.

Second stop: my aunt's house in Walnut for a family meal at 5:00 or so, where we'll eat and lounge around the table talking and laughing or in front of the television. After about three and a half hours of this, we'll leave.

Third stop: Home again, home again, where we'll watch CSI. I'll probably go to bed. My wife will probably watch ER. My son will go play guitar or video game.

Along the way, no Indians will appear at the edge of the forest or on the side of the road. None will sit at our table. Neither will the poor or the wealthy of any sort. Except for some birds overhead, we're likely to see no wildlife beyond those bodies mangled and dead on the highway.

We'll be thankful, not for being among the few to survive last winter but for each other and all the good things we have. We'll be thankful in the way we believe most pleases God and honors Christ, but we'll probably be wrong about that. Fortunately God will forgive us our selfishness and excess.

What a difference 386 years makes!

From today's Writer's Almanac:

Today is Thanksgiving Day, the day Americans express gratitude for their good fortune by eating one of the biggest meals of the year. As early as 1621, the Puritan colonists of Plymouth, Massachusetts, set aside a day of thanks for a bountiful harvest. On October 3, 1789, President George Washington proclaimed the 26th of that November the first national Thanksgiving Day under the Constitution. On October 3, 1863, in the wake of victory at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln decided to issue a Thanksgiving Proclamation, declaring the last Thursday in November national Thanksgiving Day. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set Thanksgiving Day as the fourth Thursday of November, and in 1941, Congress made it official.