Thanksgiving as Tragedy

In the middle of the War Between the States, both sides would proclaim days of ``thanksgiving,`` following the progress of the war as we now follow the progress of the stock market. After each of the first and second battles of Bull Run - which sent the Yankees fleeing back to Washington - the Confederates proclaimed days of thanksgiving. But it was Lincoln`s day that stuck. Declared after the battle of Gettysburg - the last great Napoleonic charge of military history - Thanksgiving was set for the third Thursday in the month of November, commemorating the Northern victory.

The original celebration took place in Massachusetts. It was hosted by a dour bunch of Puritans, who probably wouldn`t have been able to enjoy a good dinner if their lives depended on it. But they certainly had a lot to be thankful for.

They nearly exterminated themselves ... by wanting to boss each other around. They had arrived in Massachusetts by accident and bad seamanship, intending to settle in the more hospitable climate of Virginia, which had been colonized more than 10 years before. Once in Massachusetts, they proceeded to set up such a miserable community that surely most of them, had they lived, would have longed to return to England. The Soviets could have learned from their example and spared themselves 70 years of misery.

Only after the ``witch-burners and infant-damners`` abandoned their communal form of organization, and allowed people to work for themselves, did the colony have a prayer of survival.

But victors write the history books. And now this precarious celebration by a feeble group of religious zealots has turned into the most American holiday. After Appomattox, the South was helpless. Its natural leaders, the plantation aristocrats, were either dead, bankrupted and/or discredited.

Many of them went to Northern cities, like New York or Baltimore, where, Mencken tells us, they ``arrived with no baggage, save good manners and empty bellies.`` They enriched the North. But back home, they were sorely missed. ``First the carpetbaggers,`` says Mencken, ``ravaged the land...and then it fell into the hands of the native white trash...`` Scars of war can take a long time to heal. But 130 years later, the South is the most economically and culturally robust part of the nation.

Thanksgiving was declared a national holiday in 1931. Through the Depression, and then WWII, Thanksgiving grew in importance. In a country where roots meant almost nothing, where people were ready to pick up and move at the drop of a hat, where there were huge differences in what people thought and how they lived, Thanksgiving served to provide a unified, national myth... most popularly expressed in Norman Rockwell`s Thanksgiving cover for the Saturday Evening Post. Roots mean more in Mississippi than they do in California.

(An edited excerpt from William Bonner`s column)

the last supper, so to speak...

Somebody didn`t get the nice juicy piece of Turkey yesterday.
Unfortunately today it is too late. Angoor khattay hain, or Turkey baasi hai (grapes are sour, and turkey is spoiled).

U sound like a person of Warangal origin (in Hyderabad state).