it's funny how once you're removed from the stressful aspects of thanksgiving you can start seeing it as an okay holiday. like, now that i'm not trying to explain why beef suet in A PIE is disgusting, for starters, i can find the idea of dressing the dog up in a headdress to be a perfectly reasonable amusement.

For a couple years spanning my pre and early teens, I refused to join my family at the Thanksgiving table--in protest. My new-found political convictions were born when I put the two and two together of the abstractions we had begun learning in school--the fate of long dead Native Americans at the hands of long dead settlers--with the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, Tuscarora, Unkechauge, and Mohegan Nations with whom I shared a home state, and among whom I had been living since birth. My eleven year old self found it monumentally fucked-up to have a little yearly re-creation/celebration of imperialism and genocide, so I sat out, sulked upstairs. When that failed to sway my family, I graduated to dinner table confrontations: like asking what their opinion would be of a traditional yearly feast to commemorate the Final Solution. My Grandparents (with whom I lived during those years) were understandably upset by my attempts to "ruin it for everyone," however never punished me, so thrilled that I--the ever D student--had developed such a keen interest in history.

My protest ended one year with a combination plea/threat from my Grandfather: He said for better or worse, holidays have a tendency to be stripped of their original meaning over time. They become co-opted by society, molded and modified until they are nothing more than a kind of habit really; which is what that particular holiday had become to our family. Just a day set aside to give thanks for our blessings, to eat and drink a-plenty, spend time with loved ones. And so by sitting down at the table I was in no way condoning the murder of innocents, with the exception of the Turkey of course (I'll go into my brief vegetarianism another time). I didn't buy his rationale at first, launched into a counter argument, in fact. Until he pointed out how--for a non-Christian in a non-Christian family--I didn't seem to have any problem snarfing up the Christmas presents and sucking down my Easter Candy. He suggested that in order to avoid the appearance of being a hypocrite, I discontinue the acceptance of both--decreed it actually--effective immediately. So I sat my ass down at the table.

Last night, I began a Google image search for a picture that would depict my darker, adolescent feelings about the holiday. A lithograph of the Trail of Tears. Native women and children being trampled by men on horses carrying muskets. But when I found the corny dog and kitty posing as Indian and Settler friends, I don't know...it's how I wished it would have been. "Look, we couldn't be more different, but we're friends! There's plenty of room here for all of us! Except these nice, warm winter blankets as a token of our..."

See, I try. I went with the cute in the end, didn't I?