I never celebrated Thanksgiving with my family. I grew up in a very Latin American family living in Latin America. It’s not part of our culture, we celebrate some weird holidays as well, but mostly we just have holidays and not necessarily celebrate them. I feel like the idea of having holidays worth celebrating is something more American than Latin-American, at least from my perspective. Maybe it’s because we are lazy and want to have more days off work or school, or maybe it’s because we try to please everyone by having so many holidays that there is no point in celebrating all of them. Yet Thanksgiving is not one of those holidays, I first learned about it when I was eight and I began attending an American school and it never meant anything to me except two days off of school.
For years that was the experience I had with Thanksgiving, it was nothing more than not going to class. Occasionally I attended the Thanksgiving party at my school which included bouncy castles, arcade games and a turkey cafeteria lunch with possibly the greatest apple pie I have ever had (aside from my mom’s that is). Even if I had friends who celebrated the holiday with a little more pizzazz it was never their habit to invite me over and so thanksgiving remained this intriguing, yet weird holiday.
I even remember seeing it portrayed in movies, how entire families would get together and sit around a large table decorated in fall colors. The grandfather would sit at the end with a huge turkey in front of him and he would carve it meticulously right at the dinner table. There would be a lot of talking, sharing what each person was thankful for, and then inevitably it would always end with someone’s tears. For some reason all big family holidays seem to end in tears in movies.
Yet when I moved to the country where Thanksgiving is actually celebrated, my view of the holiday changed. Last year I spent thanksgiving with those same close friends I had in high school, a few who already celebrated Thanksgiving and a few who didn’t. My friend’s mom cooked a huge turkey for all ten of us and as good guests, we all helped out a bit. It became a daylong ordeal, the cooking, the bathing, the eating. The food was not only amazing, much better than the cafeteria, mass produced, stuff I had eaten all the previous years, but the company was the reason we were even celebrating Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is the celebration of a good harvest, originally, but the story changes over time and depending on who is telling it. The first version I ever heard of the story was that it was a bonding meal between Pilgrims and Native Americans. So I put two and two together and began to truly understand why there is such a great emphasis on this holiday. As I moved around the house all day long, helping to set up I realized that this is the whole point of the Thanksgiving. It’s the spending time with your real family or your surrogate one. It was about the laughing at each other as we took turns sticking our buttered hands into the turkey and pulling out its insides. It didn’t matter where we were coming from or what our traditions were, because as I sat at the table for dinner and looked around I realized that this was the point of Thanksgiving.
So I realized that we always have a ton of things to be thankful for. We have our health, our education, our jobs, whatever it is we are thankful for, there is always a ton of it. Yet we never stop to think about how thankful we should be of the people around us, those who take us in during our times of need or those who sit and laugh with us, we focus on the objects, on the things we can measure. I don’t know anyone who really takes the time to thank their friends and loved ones for being there and for being part of their life. Therefore this is my conclusion of what Thanksgiving is really about. It’s really about making us realize who our families are, whether blood family or our chosen family, and what they mean to us. It’s about sharing a great meal and creating great memories. Thanksgiving is about implicitly forcing us to do something that we should do regardless of the time or day, it’s about reminding us that sometimes the most important things in our lives are the ones we take for granted.