Dressing Down Thankfulness by Brendan Bruce

As turkey day approaches and we’re reminded to count our blessings and be thankful for anything and everything, it’s important to remember why we’re thankful. First of all, I’m biased a bit in that I believe we should be thankful towards someone (i.e. God… you know, he invented turkey and all the trimmings in the first place) instead of just roaming around in a tryptophan-induced haze of general thankfulness towards all.

Take our trendily dressed ancestors, the Pilgrims, for instance. After barely surviving in the new world, they sat down to a sparse meal of items they brought to the table by their own hands. They hunted the bird, picked the berries, grew the veggies and managed to defend their families from Indian attacks, cholera and small belt buckles. The most dangerous work the modern pilgrim faces is fighting through the Sam’s Club parking lot and figuring out one of those do-it-yourself credit card machines in the checkout. Our turkeys come dressed, plucked, stuffed and with a magic button that pops out of its chest to tell you it’s done and dinner is served. Kids, in the “old days” turkeys came home covered with feathers and still had a head.

A few hundred years later, the fashions had changed a little, but putting a meal on the table was still pretty much the same. The typical American would sit down to a dinner still cobbled together from whatever was grown out in the yard or hunted in the woods. I know people today who couldn’t put a meal on the table that didn’t come out of a box or wasn’t wrapped in the latest logo of a fast food chain if you held their cell phone ransom.

It wasn’t too long ago that microwaves weren’t part of the typical kitchen either. People did things the long way: churned their butter, milked cows, and drank Sanka! My great grandmother used to make a batch of biscuits in a giant bowl made from a hunk of tree by simply pouring the milk directly into that white stuff you make biscuits out of (someone tells me it’s called flour). I’ve tried to keep up the tradition and for the past three weekends in a row, I’ve whacked a round can on the edge of the counter and made biscuits too, sorry granny.

I don’t mean to disparage technology or imply the Americans of today are necessarily lazy. What I do mean to say is with all this convenience and ease, it’s easy to say “Boy, I’m thankful for the cordless vac — I can clean up the dirt from the floor mats of my SUV after soccer practice.” Hardly what our forefathers meant when they got together and planned the first Thanksgiving Day parade and lobbied for a two-day holiday. They were thankful to the Almighty for leaving a few of them around for one more year; realizing that His providence alone had spared them through the long, cold winter, a grueling summer and another football season without cable TV.

Think of the last time someone gave you a fur-lined ice scraper or a pound of coffee beans costing more than a Guatemalan family makes in a year. Did you sit amidst the shredded wrapping paper musing to yourself and those around you about how thankful you felt or did you hop up and hug Uncle Charlie and thank him over the sound of the football game? You thanked the person, right? Instead of encouraging everyone this year to “Be Thankful,” why not just say “Thank Him?”

As you’re laid out on the couch this Thanksgiving, your belly strained to the breaking point, a bony carcass of a once proud bird drying on the table and in-laws piled around like firewood, take a moment to think of the past. Think of what is was like for those who started this palate-pleasing tradition. It wasn’t about the goodies of life, the 401k rebounding or plastic wrap that clings like polyester pants on a cold winter day. Thanksgiving was directed heavenward for the blessings of another year, another crop and a land where opportunity was as boundless as the wilderness to their backs.