Thanksgiving in Lakewood... Perhaps for some, perhaps for all...

There are certain holidays that come around each year that are frankly uncomfortable for some people. See, there are some facts of life and points of view that just will not go away, no matter how much time passes. Let's face it, you just can't please everyone, can you?  

Many Protestant churches, for example, celebrate "Reformation Sunday" when, in their view at least, the Christian Church was reformed for the better. Of course, Catholics have historically held a vastly different point of view about that issue. Christmas too is a time of joyous celebration for many in America, yet at the same time there are many who do not celebrate that holiday. Religious issues also arise at Easter, and again at Halloween and Thanksgiving, with many in disagreement as to the extent and nature of how, and even whether, these holidays should be celebrated.

In addition to the religious questions, these kinds of holiday discussions have even entered into the political spectrum. Thanksgiving at its best, for example, is not a bad idea at all, and you might think that it would not be all that controversial. In one form or another, a fall harvest feast of thanksgiving has been celebrated in this land at least since 1621, with that famous (or infamous) first feast between Pilgrims and Native Americans (although Native Americans reportedly held similar harvest celebrations previously on their own).

First officially proposed to be celebrated as a national November holiday by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln revived that November commemoration time in 1863 (to be held on the last Thursday) in the midst of a terrible Civil War. Lincoln's reminder that Americans needed to give simple thanks to the Creator for all provided blessings was a heartfelt attempt to bring an appreciation of higher values to a society in sore need of healing and higher purpose. As was evidenced a few months earlier by his "Gettysburg Address," Lincoln was good at those "higher purpose" speeches and actions. (Although again, some of my Southern ancestors might not agree even with that simple statement!)

In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt, reportedly in a nod to some business people wanting to recover from the Great Depression, wanted Thanksgiving to be moved back a week earlier in order to create a longer shopping season before Christmas. At that time, however, many Republicans disagreed with Roosevelt, as they wanted to honor President Lincoln's commemoration date. Anyway, as a result, the holiday was celebrated on different dates, depending on your politics! Finally, a compromise was reached, and in December, 1941, a national holiday of Thanksgiving was proclaimed to always fall on the 4th Thursday in November from that time forward.  (That compromise somewhat satisfied both Democrats and Republicans, since, once in awhile, the 4th Thursday would be the last one of the month, and sometimes it wouldn't!)

Thanksgiving as well as Columbus Day are uncomfortable holidays for many people of Native American heritage, since those two occasions introduced a litany of circumstances resulting in the decimation of many nations of native peoples by disease and slavery, as well as through deception, thievery, and wars of attrition.

With more and more knowledge available these days about our history, there are indeed differing views concerning controversial holidays affecting people of certain backgrounds, with some groups advocating remembrance activities, and others saying that people need to forgive and forget and then move on with their lives. Some feel that we need to continue to feel a collective national guilt for past perceived injustices, while others feel that contemporary Americans don't owe anyone an apology for anything.

When I grew up, Americans were immersed in this "melting pot" mentality, where we all were supposed to suppress our heritage and "become Americans" through and through. At that time, the nation was facing the perceived threat of "World Communism," and so unity of purpose was paramount in the minds of our national leadership. In the past 20 years or so, our culture has embraced diversity more and more, so now our individual differences are once again "cool."

The only problem is, those differences can and do bring baggage, do they not? It's an uncomfortable dichotomy, isn't it? On the one hand, we want to be proud of our individual heritage and family backgrounds. The internet has made it more and more possible for us to trace our ancestry to places never dreamed of a few short years ago. DNA testing can put us in touch with long-lost relatives in places that we never could have imagined, and bring to our lives a greater and greater sense of community.

And yet there's that baggage question. We all despise injustice, and to some extent at least, virtually all of us have a soft spot for the underdogs of history. It probably would also be safe to say that if we knew the whole story of our individual ancestries, our own bloodlines would probably be peppered with the persecutors and the persecuted of history. In fact, there's a good case to be made, at least mathematically, that we all are probably related to each other, if we went back far enough in time.

Perhaps with that thought in mind, I think we can all be thankful that, for whatever reason, we all ended up here in Lakewood, and at least for the moment, we all are, at least "relatively" speaking, at peace with each other. If that's not reason enough to be thankful, I don't know what else would be.