The reason for this blog, ostensibly, is to cast an eye on America through the eyes of an outsider, an attempt at explaining America’s quirks and occasional obscenities, its marvels and wonders. Last week I did the most American thing possible and celebrated Thanksgiving in its glory in Dallas, TX. I do a bit of volunteer teaching of English to refugee women in my area, and knew nothing about Thanksgiving until we discussed it in class (the Irish teacher and her Syrian and Burmese students cobbling together a version of Thanksgiving was quite the spectacle, or so I’m told). Together, we realised how relevant the holiday is to us as non-Americans/foreigners. Thanksgiving is a lovely holiday and I think every country should have a Thanksgiving but with how hard they work and how far many are from their families, Americans need it more than the rest of us do – not that that impeded my full participation; I ate all around me and practically had to be rolled out the door when it came time for going.
The focal point of any Thanksgiving is the meal itself, and if Americans like to do things big, Texans do it bigger. My mother makes a serious Christmas dinner, but this meal was on another planet. The menu deserves a full run-down to capture its glory; twenty-two of us sat down to a dinner of turkey with homemade cranberry sauce, yeast rolls, a green bean casserole with cheese, gravy and fried onions; sweet potato casserole with toasted marshmallows on top (only in America would they melt sweets on a vegetable) and a casserole of broccoli, rice, cheese, cream and butter. There was no shortage of wine – and it wasn’t the €8 bottles from Lidl you’d be served if I was hosting – and dessert for the determined was sweet potato pie, cherry pie or apple pie. Everything was handmade and whilst the day itself was lovely, even nicer was the day before spent preparing the food. My contribution to the proceedings was my entertaining accent (lads, why did none of ye ever mention how charming my accent is?!) and the all-important job of folding napkins and setting the table. Before dinner, the football was switched off momentarily, prayers were said, and we all wrote on a wee card the things we were thankful for.
Basically, very basically, the first Thanksgiving meal was held in 1621 between Native Americans who shared a meal with the Pilgrim settlers who had come from England in search of religious freedom. The Pilgrims’ numbers had been decimated by hunger, starvation and disease and the Native Americans reached out to them, helped them sort themselves out and shared a meal to mark an agreement of cooperation between the two cultures. This I learned in class and between myself and the women, it didn’t take long to cotton on to the similarities between the circumstances of the Pilgrims and the women themselves. Just as the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in England, so too did these women flee similar situations in Burma and Syria. It seems to me that Thanksgiving honours cooperation between native people and the refugees who made a new home in America, but that narrative has never really taken off. Thanksgiving did not become a holiday until 243 years after the original meal, the end of the civil war in 1863, a period of anti-immigrant sentiment in America in response to the seemingly endless influx of immigrants, particularly Irish Catholics during and after the Famine. Though there’s a tendancy to think of the Irish as having always been welcomed, the Irish faced discrimination and hostility back then, just as several religious and ethnic communities do today. The Pilgrims arrived in the seventeenth century seeking a safe haven; in the twenty-first century it’s the Syrian and Burmese women I teach (and many others, of course). Lest it be thought we are in some migrant crisis unique to this moment, Thanksgiving is a reminder that 2019 is merely another cog in history’s wheel, a wheel that will continue to turn long after we’re gone.
But I don’t at all begrudge Americans their Thanksgiving celebration. It is a lovely and worthy holiday to have in the calendar; a day for sitting around and appreciating all there is to be thankful for. And Americans need it; they get far less time off than we do, and there’s a culture here of obsessiveness with working as hard as possible – as if life’s energies should be channelled into making (and spending) money – and so, a day of lolling around eating and watching football is a day to be treasured. $20 flights across the country are virtually non-existent, and the $120 round trips we enjoy to France and Germany for a weekend are not a thing here; rarely is a round trip less than $300. Such expense and distance keep families apart and many only see each other in the spring and again at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Thanksgiving is also lovely because there are no gifts and manic shopping beforehand. Though we hear so much about the American phenomenon of Black Friday and the magnificent bargains available (and to be fair, I nabbed a pair of jeans I needed for half price), for those who journey, the day after Thanksgiving is an all-too-rare day of relaxation to spend together. In Dallas, we went to the cinema and had dinner afterwards, and both were really crowded with families spending time together. Many of us lucky enough to have our families around us in Ireland don’t know we’re born; we get to see each other all the time and watch nieces and nephews growing up in real-time rather than for snatched moments such as Christmas and Thanksgiving.
I made a proper trip of it and decided to get the train back to Chicago, stopping off in Little Rock, Ark. for a few days and I’ll be writing all about that and my wider experience in America’s ‘Bible Belt’ next week. I certainly had much to be thankful for at Thanksgiving – not least the marriage of marshmallows and vegetables at the dinner table – but talking about it with the women from Burma and Syria really reminded me that its origin story is as relevant today as it was almost four hundred years ago. As the newcomer, thousands of miles from my own home, I was welcomed most heartily by all at the family table in Texas and when it came to scribbling all the things I was thankful for on a card, I ran out of space. Wasn’t that worth the price of the flights alone? We could all do with one of them days in our calendar.
doireann.ie 