Thanksgiving is grovy.

I enjoy how mystified the kid is by my disdain for the kinds of people who start putting Xmas decorations up well before Thanksgiving, to say nothing of the putrescent monsters who start their yicky me-me-me season before Halloween in one more of the creeping degradations in a society wrecked by an obsession with objects wrapped up in their insincere celebration of a figure that wasn't about any of that, if you believe the literature.

Lights, please.

My central holiday in a year was and remains Thanksgiving, a bizarre holiday based on the utterly falsified origin story of when our struggling band of nutty puritanical cultists who'd been kicked out of England for being weirdoes, and who came here to this "empty" country, only to starve because they were bad at everything beyond forcing people to live in shame and wear stupid hats, until the Wampanoag came along to save their crappy little church campout, dinner was served, and we all lived happily ever after.

…umm, right? That's the story they told us in Sunday School, and a version of what we heard in Hammond Elementary. Just a nice dinner, then we all got along. How nice for everyone!

Of course, yeah, there were the forced death marches and the smallpox blanket gifts and four hundred years of treaties made and broken by the lovely invad—erm, I mean "pilgrims," who just needed a place to share their good news about that world—but why dwell on the details.

Thing is—I questioned this narrative in those Sunday School classes, where our hip youth preacher would sit with his chair turned around to signal he was going to "rap" with us about the Lord in a room painted with bible stories in the psychedelic style of Peter Max, complete with a cartoon Jesus, over whose holy head hovered puffy thought balloons culminating with the inexplicable sentence "Jesus is grovy," rendered in cutesy bubble letters that always left me wondering if the historical Jesus often thought psychedelic thoughts in the third person with typos…but the ways of heaven are inscrutable, they tell us.

"But…but, didn't we kill most of the Indians and force them to move to Oklahoma?" I asked at one point in these ever-so-hip rap sessions about the Lord, shuddering a bit at the very thought of having to live in Oklahoma.

Vern, since that was what our youth pastor often suggested we call him to complete the illusion of hep casual talk, furrowed his brow, and answered, "Well, that's not what you should be taking away from this story," in the way he usually answered my frustrating questions. If I'd not been a Presbyterian, I suspect there'd be more punitive measures than just a sudden change of topic, but we were a people meant to politely disagree over highballs at stylish cocktail parties, rather than engage in the wild hurling of dinnerware that I always imagined must happen in fiery households of Italians with all the rich wildness of what I presumed Catholicism must entail.

I knew, though. We're a culture of denial and cute examples that are best not explored, and though we've been living through a political era of manufactured narratives and the diminishment of questions as a symptom of an unforgivable wakefulness, nearly every story has a filthy underside that requires context and a studious approach to reclamation if we're going to make something useful out of the whole cloth of centuries of propaganda, and that's what I've done.

Thanksgiving, for me, is a 621-mile drive through uncanny territories where we shed our sweaters and occasionally have to pull over to gawk as sinuous flocks of starlings swirl and congeal, then shoot off in streams of particles over picked fields of cotton, where the accents rise and fall and rise again, full of flea markets and discount wig worlds, epic journeys undertaken with the family and then the chosen family, and sometimes just as a sojourn full of music and photo ops, terminating at a warm and inviting place where the kin and the adopted kin crowd the kitchen, laughing and sharing our narratives.

Thanksgiving is where patient older women listened to every ridiculous thing ten-year-old me would utter, with forebearance and the occasional "land sakes," or, in more appalling situations, a well-placed "bless your heart," which reigns as the most powerful and multifarious tool in the southern lady's linguistic armory, standing like a fountain of subtext cloaked in a delicious pleasantry that our own neck of the woods seldom produced.

It's a historical thing, a moment that stays with me half the year, and which I anticipate with great enthusiasm for the half of the year leading towards the holiday, which I increasingly let spread out, like a silk skirt spinning in an ecstatic dance until I made it a weeklong holiday that was always my line-drawn in my work schedule, though it's been fading as the old loci of family starts to fall away and old familiar figures disappear or disappear into new lives.

In the end the essence remains for me, and it's that it's the axis of gratitude in my orbits around the sun, when I cannot help but remember how lucky I am to be so immersed in all these realms of possibility, and to be thankful, to the luck of the draw, the fickle finger of fate, the tao that cannot be described, or the other forces of a world driven by physics, chemistry, and occasionally contextualized in poetry that let me relish in kindness in the moment, in good fortune when I have it, and in the love and support of the friends I cultivate and magnify when I share my own love and support with them.

The smallpox blankets still fester behind that falsified history, and I treasure what goodness was inculcated into me by all the wise older women and other thoughtful sorts that makes it impossible to take the good without the bad, or—even better, makes the whole mix of things across that spectrum everpresent, even when we're finding new ways to salvage old observations. It was a terrible holiday to inherit, full of pompous nation-building myths and apologetics for the unforgivable, all in service to the theft of what wasn't ours and the claims that we're the chosen inheritors of what our forebears took, and therefore forgiven and justified, but it doesn't have to be that way.

We can build new narratives. We can practice our own version of Tibetan tonglen meditation, where we take in the suffering of others, and the complexity of life in the world, and process that into kindness, compassion, and generosity. Multiple ideas can exist at once, and I claim this holiday for myself as a point where I hone my gratitude for being alive and alert in the world at this moment, and use that to fuel my attempts to do better, and think harder, and to consider more, and realize that rare spark that's issued to us when we first open our eyes, at the very start of things for us, gaze into this blurry, incomprehensible world with utter confusion and delight, and want more of it.

We don't need to entertain the delusion of everyone just getting along back in 1621 to sanctify a myth or justify a reason to celebrate something positive, and we don't need to pretend that there's a spiritual or historical purity to something that has no claim to being thus uncomplicated in order to fashion something new of it. I choose to be with folks I love, and who love me, and each other, and that is enough. It can be a day of mourning, a day to remember, a day to spend in a kitchen, cooking and sharing stories, a happy day, and a day with edges to it.

It can be what you make it into. Our narratives are powerful.

And that is what Thanksgiving is all about for me, Charlie Brown.

Xmas doesn't hold a candle, dear heart.

© 2026 Joe Belknap Wall