Grinds my Gears

The other day in class I went off on a jag against Thanksgiving. It must have been pretty good because it got tweeted and talked about in my absence and those sort of things never happen to me. The substance of the thing is that I might just be done with Thanksgiving.

Lets start with the notion that if e story of the first thanksgiving is a true story, it is a woefully inadequate memory of those settlers' lives and their interaction with the indigenous population. The true story is that almost all the people died and that it was the start of a fairly dark relationship with the Native Americans.

Then maybe it's worth discussing that the contemporary thanksgiving is a fairly significant display of excess in a world where many live without. Rather than having the staple of the holiday be food stuffed with other food (and no, I'm not talking about a turducken, but thanks for reminding me), maybe on that day we should go without food to demonstrate our thankfulness for the food we have every other day of the year, and empathy for those that go without more often.

Those are shallow though compared to where this really comes from in my head. Mostly for me it's because it has become a holiday about travel. I guess it made more sense when extended families were fairly closely located to each other. Now though when a HUGE number of people travel across the country for two or three stressful days of demonstrated excess... Isn't their something better we could do with that time? Wouldn't doing away with thanksgiving be the green thing to do? The carbon footprint of all of those airline flights must be staggering. And for what? Many times in my adult life when I've made the trip we can't even seem to make the event last into the evening and wind up running off to the bar or the movies, or watching that third NFL game (maybe it just feels like three).

Many of the folks traveling are students who get three days off for thanksgiving. Then they come back to school only to turn around and go home again two or three weeks later. I've got an idea: blow off the holiday and make winter break start earlier.

That's a fairly uncritical view of the travel as well. Truthfully the problems start well in advance of the holiday. If you're from a family with an established tradition and a default location more power to you. But if you are in that situation let me clue you into the experience the rest have. They have to decide where to go for the holiday, and inevitably the family they decide to not visit are made upset by the decision. A fact only compounded when the jilted family also has to make the trip to the other location to have the holiday. There was movie, right? That showed one family that had to do four holidays to accommodate marriages and remarriages. Unbelievable. Wasteful and unnecessary.

Maybe the movie was for Christmas.

Don't get me started.