The Scary Truth About Thanksgiving
6:00AM alarms. Those are the worst, right? Still embraced by your lulling sheets, you’re forced to fill your drowsy eyes with bright, artificial lights, and make your way to your long, grueling day. But, once in a blue moon, when all the stars perfectly align, you get to remember that the day is the second Monday of October – it’s Thanksgiving! There are no classes to attend, no work to get to, no need to wake up. In such rare moments, sweetly sprinkled in the calendar, you are able to take a pleasant break.
Yet, before you go back to sleep, do you take a moment to think about where this holiday comes from, why we celebrate it, what it stands for? The unfortunate truth is that most people, myself included, do not give a second thought to the meaning behind Thanksgiving and other holidays. From this, the horrifying reality hidden between Thanksgiving rituals is clear: the day has become so sanitized, commercialized, and distorted from its original denotation that it has become completely devoid of meaning, a symptom and symbol of our capitalistic society’s tendency to trade authenticity for profit.
There are many origin stories and legends as to how the celebration of Thanksgiving came to be. Even if Indigenous peoples have had a long history of holding communal celebrations for the fall harvest, that part of history has been ignored and erased to the benefit of European tales of Thanksgiving, with the first in North America being accredited to Sir Martin Frobisher and his crew in 1578, in modern day Nunavut. Later, loyalists fleeing the American Revolution brought with them some beloved Thanksgiving traditions to Canada, like turkey feasts, and the use of squashes and pumpkins. Then, after being set manually each time by the Canadian Parliament every year for many decades, it was finally decided in 1957 that Thanksgiving will from then on always happen on every second Monday of October (Cooper, 2019).
In any iteration and telling that it had had, Thanksgiving has always been about gratitude towards nature. It is a time to remind ourselves that we are completely dependent on our environment for our survival, that our current actions and ways of living are constantly waning and destroying it, and that we must act to preserve it for future generations. It has always been a day of humility, a cognizance of our parasitic role within the ecosystem, and a promise to grow as people and societies.
However, this message doesn’t really fit with the ideal that capitalism has attributed to all holidays: an opportunity to consume. With plastic decorations doomed to be discarded and decadent feasts no one wants to finish, Thanksgiving has become a sanitized symbol of overconsumption, a meaningless charade completely antithetical to everything it once stood for. The “zombification” of Thanksgiving and other holidays is ultimately a testament to the fact that, in this day and age, nothing is sacred; no tradition is immune to being butchered and dissected by those seeking to make a quick buck. Everything must be commodified, everything must have a price, including our very own souls and values.
All in all, I find it a great shame and horror that we all go through Thanksgiving while being oblivious to what it stands for – while also being sympathetic to the forces that have ruined it. If we truly want to bring a positive change in the world, it is imperative that we start by reappropriating the holidays that are rightfully ours from the claws of faceless magnates and billionaires.
Source: Cooper, Celine. “Thanksgiving in Canada | the Canadian Encyclopedia.” Thanksgiving in Canada, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2019, thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/thanksgiving-day.
