As we gather around tables across the land, getting ready to gorge ourselves on justified excess, no one is actually fooled into thinking this holiday is significant. We all know it's a day off and time to spent with the family in a nation where you work 50 weeks a year. Hell, even if it were "National Rectal Exam Day" we'd love it as a holiday. We are surrounded by food, family, and comforts; insistent Death is far away. However, the people who are neurotic because of their wealth and positions of relative uselessness - everyone from the soccer moms to the newspaper commentators to the talking heads on television and the "celebrities" - will moan about the genocide of American Indians. There will be self-blame, and weeping, and then self-flagellation, of course, because it's easier to cry over a situation than to fix the problem that caused it. A little blasphemy is in order. http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/thanksgiving
Turkey Day is my favorite holiday since I get to glut myself without worrying about spirituality. Just good ol' unadulterated gluttony.
The Wampanoag Indians were not the "friendly savages" some of us were told about when we were in the primary grades. Nor were they invited out of the goodness of the Pilgrims' hearts to share the fruits of the Pilgrims' harvest in a demonstration of Christian charity and interracial brotherhood. The Wampanoag were members of a widespread confederacy of Algonkian-speaking peoples known as the League of the Delaware. For six hundred years they had been defending themselves from my other ancestors, the Iroquois, and for the last hundred years they had also had encounters with European fishermen and explorers but especially with European slavers, who had been raiding their coastal villages.(6) They knew something of the power of the white people, and they did not fully trust them. But their religion taught that they were to give charity to the helpless and hospitality to anyone who came to them with empty hands.(7) Also, Squanto, the Indian hero of the Thanksgiving story, had a very real love for a British explorer named John Weymouth, who had become a second father to him several years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth. Clearly, Squanto saw these Pilgrims as Weymouth's people.(8) To the Pilgrims the Indians were heathens and, therefore, the natural instruments of the Devil. Squanto, as the only educated and baptized Christian among the Wampanoag, was seen as merely an instrument of God, set in the wilderness to provide for the survival of His chosen people, the Pilgrims. The Indians were comparatively powerful and, therefore, dangerous; and they were to be courted until the next ships arrived with more Pilgrim colonists and the balance of power shifted. The Wampanoag were actually invited to that Thanksgiving feast for the purpose of negotiating a treaty that would secure the lands of the Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims. It should also be noted that the INDIANS, possibly out of a sense of charity toward their hosts, ended up bringing the majority of the food for the feast.(9) http://www.night.net/thanksgiving/lesson-plan.html
It is supposed to be when everyone from a "family" gathers together for a celebration of the past year and take in the families doings during the year. It was,as was stated in what I posted, started with the families of Pilgrams and Native americans to be thankful of the foods they gathered and living together that year.
Thanks cosmic, so does it all turn into a family brawl due to the stress and strain of meeting relations you would rather not see? I don't mean a physical thing, i mean having to kiss a whiskery old aunt you have'nt seen for years who still thinks your eight, and is threatening to knit you a train set for christmas type of irritation? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Sometimes, but if they stay sober that usually doesn't happen. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Have you seen Washington's original endorsement of the holiday? What a jesus freak. I am however, thankful for the turkey holocaust.
Interesting. Although not really shocking. Many of our holidays seem to have taken on added weight as time goes by. A simple thanksgiving becomes rooted somehow with the pilgrims and the preferred cut of meat becomes a turkey. I wonder when these changes came into being? This past century? Much of the sacharinization of America seems to have taken place in the last century. The myth of an earlier time built as America became king of the world. Most cultures have an autumn harvest festival, don't they? Isn't Thanksgiving just another harvest festival? Last hurrah before winter sets in.
Yeah, we have two of these. The first one is called Mikeli and then the final crop and other stuff is harvested, then after the silent time of the dead/shadow period (with the culmination of what you call Halloween, but is very different). Then comes the time when all the autumn jobs are done and one can sit and eat all the stuff harvested, a celebration. It's called Martini. Since ages forgotten latvians have been killing geese on these fests. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I won't go into further boring paganic rituals. //giggles
Another excuse for more excessive and futile consumption... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
i think its funny how in Australia we politically fixed up everything that was hurting the Aborigines, but society doesnt give a stuff about them. And in America its the other way around. Politically they're all disadvantaged and on reservations, but socially people feel "compassion" and "remorse" for what happened to them... :bugeye:
What a shit attitude. You deserve the misery you create for yourself, because you created it for yourself.
