PACKET EDITORIAL, Nov. 21
By: Packet Editorial
It’s customary at this time of year to take a moment and give thanks not necessarily to the denizens of the Massachusetts Bay Colony whose historic détente we commemorate with this week’s holiday, but for anything and everything else we have to be thankful for.
Outside of elementary schools, where children dress up in Pilgrim hats and feathered headdresses to re-create the celebration of the harvest that first took place way back in 1621, few of us think of Thanksgiving as a holiday that celebrates a particular event. Rather, it celebrates a spirit of family, of friendship, of the common bond formed by sharing food and fellowship on this festive occasion. It was, in fact, the desire to forge a common national identity in the aftermath of the Civil War that turned Thanksgiving from a relatively minor holiday celebrated primarily in New England into a major holiday observed throughout the United States.
Since then, Thanksgiving has come to symbolize a great many things to a great many people.
To football fans, Thanksgiving is rivalry day. Gridirons from Maine to Hawaii host contests between traditional high school rivals, usually on Thanksgiving morning, before the players hang up their helmets and shoulder pads for the season. College rivals play throughout the extended Thanksgiving weekend, starting Thursday morning and continuing, virtually nonstop, through Saturday night. And the Dallas Cowboys host the customary Thanksgiving Day game that glues National Football League fans to the TV and keeps many of them from slipping into tryptophan-induced slumber.
To shoppers, Thanksgiving represents the interlude before the really important occasion: "Black Friday." Thursday is the day to rest up for the official start of the Christmas shopping season. Friday is the day the true shopper will rise before the sun, line up outside the nearest mega-mall long before the doors open, then gleefully trample over other true shoppers looking for either the perfect gift or the biggest bargain to be had in this annual test of one’s endurance, dexterity and credit-card limits. (Not to be outdone, some countercultural curmudgeons have dubbed the day after Thanksgiving "Buy Nothing Day" urging consumers not to purchase anything to protest the wasteful consumption habits of First World countries. It seems no holiday is worth celebrating these days unless it inspires a good protest movement.)
To children of all ages, Thanksgiving is the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the three-hour televised spectacle of colorful floats, marching bands, enormous balloons in the shape of popular cartoon characters and scores of lip-synching entertainers wending their way down Broadway and culminating in the appearance of Santa Claus at Macy’s department store on 34th Street. (Back in less commercial times, Santa’s appearance at Macy’s was traditionally the first of the holiday season; nowadays, his likeness starts showing up around Halloween, or Columbus Day, or Labor Day, in the windows of less traditional and more aggressive shopkeepers.)
But beyond its association with parades, purchases and pigskins, Thanksgiving is still thankfully pretty much celebrated the way it has been for decades. It’s the day many of us travel over the river and through the woods (usually in numbers so large we turn highways into parking lots and trains and buses into sardine cans) to grandmother’s house. There, we enjoy a bountiful turkey dinner with all the traditional trimmings in the comfort of people we hold dear. And that, in and of itself, should be reason enough to be thankful.

