Nov 27 2008
Thanksgiving Grandma Layton Style
Elizabeth Layton was a Kansas native artist who battled depression until she took up drawing at the age of sixty-eight. Her work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, and numerous other exhibits around the USA. Although she is gone now, her memory continues on. You can visit her website at http://elizabethlayton.com/.
One of my favorite pictures by Grandma Elizabeth Layton is the one shown here entitled “Thanks-giving”. She doesn’t like to cook, so the family gets carry-out Kentucky Fried Chicken for the holiday meal. How many harried mothers and grandmothers dream of doing this one year, saying to heck with it, I’m not cooking this year?
Although I am typically not one for discarding traditions, I am starting to wonder about this holiday we call “Thanksgiving” and it’s associated myths. Native Americans don’t like the holiday and what it represents to their people. They don’t like how it perpetuates stereotypes about Indians, and they certainly don’t like how Europeans went on to treat the indigenous people on this continent after that first “Thanksgiving” feast.
Judging from this picture, one can guess that Elizabeth Layton probably would not have a problem with taking the Pilgrims and Indians completely out of Thanksgiving. She was a person of great empathy for the plight of others, providing much in the way of social commentary in her work.
Here’s the thing about Thanksgiving with my family. I don’t recall ever having any discussions of Pilgrims and Indians and that “First Thanksgiving” meal. Any of those sort of myths in my recollection were perpetuated at school, not in my church or in my family gatherings. For my family, Thanksgiving has always been a special time of coming together as a family, and truly being thankful for the blessings we have received.
In a world where people are increasingly feeling entitled, having a holiday that fosters an attitude of gratitude can’t be all bad in my mind. And as Grandma Layton shows us, it doesn’t matter what the meal is, as long as families and friends can come together and be grateful for what we have been given.
Perhaps it is time to think about ways in which we can reinvent the Thanksgiving holiday. I’m not talking about a complete abandonment of traditions, but only a change of course that acknowledges and tries to fix some of the flaws in how we celebrate. For example, in the USA, November is Native American Heritage Month. Instead of keeping the Pilgrim/Indian myths alive, why not replace that tradition with learning something about actual Native American history and culture?
2 responses so far
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The myths chosen by societies are chosen for reasons of power. Which is why we pretend America “was founded” by Calvinist radicals so intolerant of everyone that they managed to get thrown out of Amsterdam. A myth our Thanksgiving celebrations helps reinforce.
Why not New Amsterdam as a founding myth of tolerance and cultural sharing (I’m sure they had harvest celebration meals as well) - see the book Island at the Center of the World, just the first couple of chapters.
Or Jamestown - those folks were “only in it for the money” - which is “as American as Apple Pie.”
Or why not recreate Thanksgiving as a native festival, to which “immigrants” are welcome.
Or go back to the Old Testament Sukkoth.
Any of these constructions would give the US better “heroes” than the current version.
Or we might try an ahistorical simple sense of being Thankful right now for having so much, combined with a few moments of promising to do better things with all of our wealth in the future.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Ira, I think your final suggestion of simply being thankful without any historical context describes how my family (and many others, I suspect) approaches the holiday.
I’m a little troubled by stories like the one in California in which parents argued over the merits of wearing paper pilgrim hats and paper Indian regalia.
One side of the discussion seems to ignore the offensiveness and insensitivity to a culture, while the other side appears to want to completely dismantle a tradition.
I happened to visit our local elementary school on Tuesday and sure enough, there were the kids in paper “Thanksgiving” duds, half of the class as Pilgrims and half as Indians. I’m certain the adults behind the celebration have no malicious intent, and could possibly be open to gentle persuasion to do something more constructive with the holiday.
The key is in having a reasonable discussion about the issues and looking for ways to reach a reasonable compromise. Evidently this is too much to ask when it is a question of taking away the kids’ paper hats.