Armitage thanks

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that are troublesome for historians. I’ve always been a melancholy sort, but the study of history is in general not designed to cheer one up. Never fear, though, this post has a happy ending.

Honestly, among the holidays I celebrate or remember, it’s  probably my favorite personally. I like it way better than Fourth of July and at least as much as Passover, though this involves comparing apples to oranges, and the only Christian celebration that came anywhere close in my heart is the first Sunday in Advent. (Which is right around the corner, too.) The women in my family went to church on Thanksgiving morning, where my grandparents’ generation sang Now Thank We All Our God and in our generation we sang We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing, or its twin, We Praise Thee O God, Our Redeemer, Creator (which is a borrowing from the Dutch and might in fact have been sung by the inhabitants of the Plymouth colony) or Come Ye Thankful People Come. The men were out hunting deer. Sometime in the late morning we drove out to my paternal grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner, singing this song in the car, which we found especially appropriate because we did have to cross a river to get there and they lived in the middle of the woods. The smell as one walked into the porch of that house — a combination of cooking, cold, and the odor from the wood-burning stove — is the only sense memory I have that ever appears in my dreams. Six or seven hours later then we drove out to my maternal grandparents’ house, about five miles away, for a second Thanksgiving meal with my other set of cousins. Ooomph. It was one of the days on which we ate the sweet corn we managed to freeze in August, and oh was it sweet. I could write a long piece about this, and maybe I will sometime, though American memories of Thanksgiving are easy to find.

Though we love it, Thanksgiving is not a clean holiday.

Historically, its origins — not surprisingly — are not especially well documented. The Plymouth Rock colony did celebrate a day of Thanksgiving, and one of a very few primary sources that discuss this event does suggest the presence of Wampanoags at the event. Some elements of the story we learned as children about the Pilgrim – Indian love fest may not be entirely wrong. At the same time its romanticization hides the fact that the encounter between Europeans and Native Americans was on the whole disastrous for Native Americans, and whatever the events of the actual first Thanksgiving Day, the myth of Thanksgiving has often been used to hide or minimize the destruction of that exchange, or alternately to imply that it happened so long ago that we no longer need to be concerned about its consequences. November is Native American Heritage month, and our fellow Armitage blogger Avalon has posted recently about her own family’s history as Cherokee who walked the Trail of Tears.

Of course, most of us now think neither about the Pilgrims and Indians or the Day of Thanksgiving, but about the food.  The campus newspaper at my university  interviewed a series of immigrant students in this morning’s edition to find out what they were doing for Thanksgiving and most were cooking turkey because they felt it was de rigueur but had no idea of the actual significance of the holiday. On a culinary level I think of it as that day to eat foods of American origin, and when I lived in Germany, where I made extreme efforts to celebrate the holiday correctly, the question was always how I was going to put my hands on some cranberries. Servetus herself will be joining a group of friends for a potluck event in which every participant is supposed to bring the side dish which most symbolizes Thanksgiving to him or her. (Servetus thinks that this is mostly a way to resolve the contentious debate between partisans of different kinds of dressings for the turkey — incidentally, Servetus prefers bread stuffing with giblets, sausage, and sage — and thus avoid internecine warfare.) Since the person with whom I associate the dish that most exemplifies the holiday for me is dead, and baking it  — hickory nut pie — always makes me sad, not to mention that I have no idea where I’d get hickory nuts since the only place I ever ate them as a child was at my grandparents’ house, where the floor of the spare bedroom was always covered with nuts in various stages of drying, I am bringing a cheese plate instead.

Laying aside the problematic history of the holiday and the questionable priority for heavily carbohydrate-laden food as the thing that brings us all together, one aspect of the holiday I can get behind easily is the idea of giving thanks. In my family we go around the table after grace and talk about the things that we are most thankful for since we all saw each other the last time. Even in terrible years we can all think of something. If I were put on the spot, I suppose, I’d admit being thankful that the circumstances of my life, if at times unhappy, will nonetheless lead me to significant changes in the relatively short term. And although it sounds melodramatic, I’d also say a silent prayer of thanks that both my parents survived this year.

For you, readers, celebrating the holiday or not, I offer the video below. It started off as a project to observe how Mr. Armitage says the word “thanks,” as it’s on a list of words he says that I find particularly alluring. At this point it’s just a collection of clips and I make no claim to having captured every instance of this word in his speech. It’s also limited to his roles; I didn’t go through any interviews for these items: roughly seven minutes of utterances of the words “thank,” “thanks,” and “thank you” from the mouth of the great thespian. It seems appropriate, since I’m also thankful for the discovery of Richard Armitage this year, and thankful for the hard work he puts in on his art, which has served me so well.

Feel free to comment on Mr. Armitage’s words of thanks, or on what you’re thankful for this year, or on where you stand on the debate about what kind of stuffing to put inside that ubiquitous turkey. Happy Thanksgiving, U.S. Americans and anyone else who is celebrating the holiday with us. It’s a good opportunity for me to remember, in the face of change and trouble, that my G-d’s mercy endures forever.

~ by Servetus on November 25, 2010.