Over a third of Americans, myself included, plan to travel during this year’s Thanksgiving holiday, and small wonder. It’s difficult to find any civilization without a ritual gratitude gathering when the harvest is in. They called it “Thesmophoria” in ancient Greece and “Cerealia” in Rome. Assyrians, Persians and pre-Columbian Americans all had their versions. “Thank you, god(s), for helping us survive the year and giving us a shot at the coming one.”
My favorite term for it is “ingathering.” It’s biblical, it was used in 16th century England, and it just sounds so right. The harvest has been processed and stored. The animals are down from summer pastures. Life moves indoors and inward. There’s also winter work to be done of course, but unlike relatively dispersed summer work, we huddle together more while doing it.
As a child, I was oblivious to ingathering. I was raised in Manhattan without so much as a goldfish by Jewish/Viennese Holocaust refugee parents who could barely grow a cactus and chose to never celebrate America’s ingathering. Probably, after losing 95% of their large and loving family to the Nazi killing machine, gathering the half-dozen survivors who escaped to New York was too reminiscent of the multitude that would never gather again.
I learned America’s Thanksgiving myth at school, but my first inkling about the feel of an American Thanksgiving came during my freshman fall in Central New York’s farm country, on the two-mile walk from the Cornell campus to downtown Ithaca. Decorated front porches were piled with fruits of the harvest, crisp winds cut the clean autumn air and children laughed amidst the falling leaves. As the holiday approached, I yearned to go home even though my family’s walk-up flat was nothing like those iconic streets.
I learned more about America’s Thanksgiving at friends’ and girlfriends’ homes. When I met Niki, I adopted her big family, they adopted me, and I spent every ingathering with them. I came to love that holiday, and I still do. Later, raising our own family, we had many ingatherings in our home. Now, with most of my grandchildren grown, we are privileged to celebrate with our niece and nephew in Portland. This year’s travel plans are complete and I’m looking forward to huddling together, reviewing the year and getting mentally and spiritually ready for winter.
But, as I write this, on the eve of Election Day 2024, things feel strangely amiss. What will the weeks between tomorrow evening and our ingathering bring? What more will we know by the time you read this and what will we still be wondering about? What will the country that rescued my parents and made my life possible be like?
Will democracy hold, allowing UA 498 to take off as planned? Will it be delayed due to the inconveniences of martial law or even canceled due to the outbreak of a civil war? Will we be roasting turkeys and baking pies more or less as usual? Anything seems possible tonight, as we wait for the polls to open tomorrow, but there’s one thing I am pretty sure about: This election won’t resolve our national differences. Just getting past this election with a reasonably intact and functional country is the best outcome I dare to hope for.
“How did we get here?” I’m tempted to ask, but then I think that we didn’t “get here” at all. We’ve been here for a long, long time. Socioeconomic class struggles, attempts at cultural homogeneity, resisting changes wrought from within and without, conflicts between idealists wanting to build brave new futures that will never quite be and idealists wanting to return to former prosperity, peace and greatness that never quite were — there’s nothing unusual about all that. What does seem unusual, and much more worrisome, is the growing loss of faith in our institutions for resolving those differences. And elections are, of course, the institution at the very core of our society.
This isn’t our first rodeo. The Founders didn’t want to overthrow or even change the British Government. They just wanted fair representation within it. When they lost hope of achieving that, they went to war. Whites in slave states went to war again when growing egalitarianism seemed about to destroy their most cherished institution. Both times, violent social disruption was preceded by decades of maneuvering and compromises intended to avert what eventually happened, and both wars failed to settle the differences that caused them. Has the Great American Experiment reached another such watershed moment?
It will be a while before we know. In the meantime, this Thanksgiving may remain disturbingly unique but life goes on and it’s time for ingathering. For guidance on how to best conduct myself under these circumstances, I’m turning to Reverend Florence Kaplow paraphrasing Kurt Vonnegut: “We should be unusually kind to one another. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one.” This will be good advice to remember in Portland if circumstances allow me to get there, and perhaps even better advice if they don’t.
Mature Content is a monthly feature from Age-Friendly Carbondale.