“Lord, we cleared this land. We plowed it, sowed it, and harvest it. We cook the harvest. It wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t be eating it if we hadn’t done it all ourselves. We worked dog-bone hard for every crumb and morsel, but we thank you Lord just the same for the food we’re about to eat, amen.” – Jimmy Stewart as Charlie Anderson in “Shenandoah.”

Sad to say, a lot of people think like Charlie Anderson in the 1965 film and don’t know who or what to thank on this day.  Thanksgiving is a harvest festival that might have been first celebrated in 1621 by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation.  The idea still seems fine even though most of us have little to do with the production of crops and see the day as a time spent with family.

Black Friday casts a pall over the holiday because it traditionally marks the Christman shopping season where we all rush out and buy what nobody really wants other than to brag we got it cheap. Every major holiday is sulled up by turning into a commercial farce.

This is a sad Thanksgiving for my wife and me because we normally visit my daughter, her husband, and my two granddaughters on Thanksgiving, but illness is keeping us away.

In many ways, Thanksgiving bothers me because–assuming the first celebration happened as history and legend tell us, the hope and thanks of those days turned into a nightmare for the country’s indigenous people that is still going on today. So, the first Thanksgiving is rather like going over to some new friends’ house and then killing them after dinner and stealing the house.

But never mind that since most of us have spent many memorable days with family and friends eating a wonderful meal (not counting family members we normally try to avoid), and eating until the football games begin and we fall asleep on first and goal.

Mother often noted when my two brothers and I were growing up, that the meal took hours to make, fifteen minutes to eat, and another hour for cleaning up the kitchen. I still like the turkey drumstick best in spite of the bones in it. And as far as I know, I’ve never touched Stove Top Stuffing. My wife and I make our own and it’s do much better than the mysterious stuff that comes out of a box.

But, I digress. I hope we remember what this holiday celebrates.

–Malcolm