I'm still grateful...

Dear Friends,

Growing up as your average white middle class American, I have the deepest fondness for the "holiday season" which begins for our family at Halloween. The turn of the wheel toward Autumn meant a warmness in our house that didn't exist any other time of year. After the joys of becoming something else for a night and the sugar highs of Halloween I would turn my eye toward Thanksgiving: The Great Feast, as I thought of it.

This celebration of bounty, the coming together with family, the incredible show of abundance and special dishes that were made only for this special day, are my experience and my associations of Thanksgiving. My private reflections of what I am grateful for as I sit at this table with the people who love me some of the most are my favorite memories that I have.

I imagine what an agricultural life must have been like even just 100 years ago. The finish of harvest. All of the bustling, and busy work, long days to put up food for the winter. Temperatures that weren't quite cold enough to keep fresh foods long enough to enjoy later. Small communities celebrating the long work of summer over, and sharing the last of the fresh stuff before settling in to the winter. My heart knows that this goes beyond a date picked on a calendar, or a formal bank holiday. This is one of our recently forgotten rites. In our efforts to preserve the feeling of this, we have been told the story of Thanksgiving.

The weird story of Pilgrims and Indians we learned in school never made sense to me. I always felt that something had been left out. As an adult, I most certainly believe that starving white people who were facing a deep winter in a place where they didn't know shit about how to feed themselves were most certainly grateful. I also know that a couple hundred years later, the government that came to rule over our country systematically destroyed the native tribes of this land, those who extended their hand to save the lives of the first immigrants. And in these times of reckoning, we are asked to examine the ways in which things have been white washed. We are asked to examine sexism, and racism, and all of the isms. And that is right, and that is good, and that must be done.

And yet, there is something to this time of year that is beyond the last several hundred years of painful civilization that we have experienced, all of us. Beneath all of it, is the reverence for life. The recognition that life is precious, and that deep feeling in our subconscious, the dark truth that we all might not make it through the winter. The understanding that right now, we have much, and we can choose to think we deserve everything we have, or we can look in wonder at our homes, our cars, our phones, our cupboards full of food, our refrigerators brimming with bounty, and be grateful. We can give a kind word to the people we see every day, we can offer a smile to a stranger, we can open our hearts to our neighbors.

This white lady still feels grateful during Thanksgiving. She still wants to gather with her family and appreciate the year past. She still enjoys what this time of year means deep down, in the part of her that is thousands of years old. She hopes that all that she loves survives the winter, and will put her blessings upon it all tomorrow, the Great Feast day.

With love,
Ginger {aka Rachel Lazarus}
November 22, 2017, Cult of Gemini Newsletter