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Thanksgiving Sampler
"Rules for a Non-Partisan Thanksgiving," a prayer when you aren't grateful, and some inspiration to keep you going
HAPPY THANKSGIVING to my American readers! 🦃
And today is a great day for gratitude for everyone in every country. 🙏
Below the picture, you’ll find a piece I wrote for CNN in November 2018 about Thanksgiving Anxiety Disorder. I’ve also included the prayer I wrote a few years ago that is now used widely in churches and in homes. And there are some tidbits of inspiration.
Advent at the Cottage this year centers on justice and joy. Yeah, I know. I’ve actually been watching a bit more news this week. Justice is under threat and joy is scarce right about now.
But we’re going to help one another find traces of both this December.
Free subscribers can expect themed Sunday Musings on the topic — with a surprise or two along the way.
Paid subscribers will be treated to an online Advent retreat and a daily Advent calendar with a plethora of special guests.
To sign up for a free subscription, become a paid subscriber, or give a gift of The Cottage, click on the button below for a seasonal discount of 10% off of the yearly rate.
Build longer tables, not higher walls.
— José Andrés
Thanksgiving Anxiety Disorder: How To Beat It
Diana Butler Bass, originally published at CNN.com, November 19, 2018
Holidays often provoke stress, especially in families strained by emotional tensions, economic challenges, or grief. After the 2016 election, however, that stress metastasized into a full-on cultural disorder: American Thanksgiving Anxiety.
Although I’m pretty sure I’m the first to name it, there is real evidence of such a disorder. Social scientists Keith Chen and Ryne Rohla discovered that Americans significantly shortened Thanksgiving dinners in recent years, especially when spending the holiday with relatives of the opposite political party. Democrats celebrating Thanksgiving in Republican areas spent 20-40 minutes less time over the meal; Republicans visiting Democratic relations reduced holiday visits by 50-70 minutes.
Thanksgiving has become polarized. We only want to feast with our own tribe.
In the last year while speaking about my book Grateful, I’ve had conversations across the country about gratefulness, especially about the power of giving thanks to renew a divided country. “We can celebrate together,” I remind listeners, “food, the bounty of the earth, the gifts of life and work, the pleasure of relationships … and the call to serve others as we have been served.”
Audiences cheer this vision. After each speech, however, at least one person has stood up, launched into a tale of a relative ruining Thanksgiving by pontificating on politics, and asked: “What can I do about Thanksgiving dinner?”
With this question, dozens nod their heads in recognition, clearly worried about their own divided families at Thanksgiving.
This worried the researchers. “Some people don’t see losing dinner with relatives as a particularly large cost,” commented Rohla. “I’ve talked to people who are, ‘Well, so what?’ Personally I think it is concerning. To me it’s a symptom of a broader decline in the social fabric of the United States.”
So, what can we do about Thanksgiving dinner?
First, if it is too hard to spend Thanksgiving with your MAGA-cap-wearing uncle or your sister in her “She Persisted” T-shirt, don’t. But if you opt out, be sure you don’t mope at home over a frozen meal watching football. Instead, volunteer. Serve dinner at a homeless shelter. Attend a religious service. Visit a cancer ward or a senior center. Invite international students to your house and make them a Thanksgiving meal. Do something on Thanksgiving that strengthens ties between people, even if it is hard to do with your own relatives. Reaching out to strangers can be the first step toward reaching out again to your own kin.
Second, if you must spend the holiday with a politically divided family, you can do some things to lessen anxiety, whether you are the host or a guest.
If you are the host, much of what happens at the dinner depends on what you do to make your guests – all your guests – feel safe and valued. Don’t assume people will get along. Even if they don’t fight about Donald Trump, they may well fight about other things that used to be less controversial – like football or the weather. Be proactive about potential conflicts. Provide “Rules for a Nonpartisan Thanksgiving” at each seat. Make them funny: no throwing food; no fights over dark or light meat or jellied versus whole-berry cranberry sauce; no flipping between FOX and MSNBC during dinner.
Hosts can also encourage meaningful talk in ways that respect others. Have guests write down what they are grateful for, put the slips in a jar, and then have people draw papers and read the thanks of others out loud. Offer a “menu” of conversation starters. Ask each person to share a memory of a favorite Thanksgiving. Good memories remind people of meaningful family moments and may put present tensions in a broader context.
If you are brave, have your guests address politics directly. Ask those gathered when they’ve last had a meal with someone of a different political party or felt truly grateful for different opinions and perspectives. If you are a Republican, have a story ready from your own life about what you appreciate and what you’ve learned from your Democratic relatives (and the opposite for those of you who are Democrats).
If you are a guest, remember that you are responsible for your own behavior. If you have a good relationship with the host, call in advance and let him or her know you are feeling anxious about the visit. Ask your mother to say something to Uncle Joe before dinner – to go easy on politics, to keep the conversation away from divisive topics, to remember that kindness is an important part of being family. Prepare strategies for maintaining your cool. Have a “text-a-friend” ready. Use bathroom breaks tactically. Deflect controversy with jokes. Take a long walk after dinner. Put your therapist on speed-dial. Bring the greatest dessert ever as a gift; if you contribute good food, it is harder for people to get mad at you. If you decide to engage a political concern, do so with both facts and humor.
Above all, have appropriate expectations. You aren’t going to convert anybody over Thanksgiving dinner, but you might start a new conversation with an estranged relative that could continue into the future.
Thanksgiving is the only holiday Americans have specifically to celebrate gratitude, to recognize the bounties of creation and community upon which we all depend. And, as with so many other aspects of American society right now, we have work to do. The table needs to be reset. This Thanksgiving, remember that our lives are a gift, that all we have and all that sustains us are gifts, and that we can choose – even around the most awkward holiday table – to be thankful with and for each other.
A Thanksgiving Prayer: We Choose Gratitude
Adapted from Grateful: The Subversive Power of Giving Thanks
by Diana Butler Bass
GOD, there are many days we do not feel grateful.
When we are anxious or angry. When we feel alone. When we do not understand what is happening in the world or with our neighbors. When the news is bleak and confusing. When there are threats, injustice, violence, and war.
We struggle to feel grateful.
But this Thanksgiving, we choose gratitude.
We choose to accept life as a gift from you, and as a gift from the unfolding work of all creation.
We choose to be grateful for the earth from which our food comes; for the water that gives life; and for the air we all breathe.
We choose to thank our ancestors, those who came before us, for their stories and struggles; we receive their wisdom as a continuing gift for today.
We choose to see our families and friends with new eyes, accepting them for who they are.
We are thankful for our homes, whether humble or grand.
We choose to appreciate and care for our neighbors whatever our differences or how much we feel hurt or misunderstood by them.
We choose to open our hearts to those who dwell among us in the shadows of uncertainty and fear, recognizing their full dignity and humanity.
We choose to see the world as our shared commons, our home now and the legacy we will leave to the generations to come.
God, this Thanksgiving, we do not give thanks. We choose it.
We will make this choice of thanks with courage, knowing that it is humbling to say “thank you.”
We choose to open ourselves to your sacred generosity, aware that we live in an unending circle of gratitude. We all are guests at your hospitable table around which gifts are passed and received.
We will not let anything opposed to love take over this table.
Instead of giving into fear, we embrace grace, love, and the gifts of life at this table. In this choosing, and in the sharing of this meal, we are strengthened to pass gratitude on to the world.
Thus, with you, with all those gathered at this table, and with those at tables far distant, we pledge to make thanks.
We ask you to strengthen us in this resolve.
Here, now, and into the future. Around our family table. Around the table of our nation. Around the table of the earth.
We choose thanks. Amen.
Gratitude is not a psychological or political panacea, like a secular prosperity gospel, one that denies pain or overlooks injustice, because being grateful does not “fix” anything. Pain, suffering, and injustice—these things are all real. They do not go away.
Gratitude, however, invalidates the false narrative that these things are the sum total of human existence, that despair is the last word. Gratitude gives us a new story. It opens our eyes to see that every life is, in unique and dignified ways, graced: the lives of the poor, the castoffs, the sick, the jailed, the exiles, the abused, the forgotten as well as those in more comfortable physical circumstances.
Your life. My life. We all share in the ultimate gift — life itself.
Together. Right now.
― Diana Butler Bass,
Grateful: The Subversive Power of Giving Thanks
This is so great and so widely applicable -- thank you. I will add to your list of ways to be together in "harmony": if you play an acoustic musical instrument, ask whether you could bring it to play on the side, not as a concert, but with others. Ask around what other guests play an instrument, and perhaps share a Google doc or etc. ahead of time of songs you all know / could sing or play that are "safe."
You wrote that nobody can get too angry at the person who brought that fantastic dessert. Same for music -- it's hard to get mad at the person who literally "plays well with others" and who also just sang that song you loved when you were in high school. 100 years ago, the musicians who came to the party were honored guests who added to the festive feeling. The jam wasn't a concert; it was the soundtrack above which the party occurred.
Playing / singing with others in a jam requires all the same consideration that a good relationship or a good conversation does: listen carefully; you don't always have to be the one talking; take turns; everyone gets a chance to take a solo if they want; everyone gets to sing if they want; there are no "bad singers," and when it's your turn you get to pick the song you like even if it's not everyone's favorite, because it's your turn. (And also, don't push awkward choices on people just because it's your turn so you can do it.)
Dust off that instrument. If an instrument you never played is calling to you, listen, and don't wait til next year to start. Make some joyful noise. Play across the aisle.
Diana,
Thank you for your thoughts. I'm attaching a poem I love by Kayleen Asbo:
All the More
If the Great Darkness is descending,
Let me praise all the more
Every last ray of light.
If famine is our future,
May I savor all the more
Every meal eaten with those I love.
If extinction is our destiny,
May I cherish all the more
Each bird's unique song as it greets the sunrise.
While it is yet possible,
May I be more generous,
More giving,
More grateful,
More present and awake
To the abundant beauty
That is still here
Today.
- Kayleen Asbo
And another by Lao Tsu
We Are A River
Our life has not been an ascent; up one side
of a mountain and down the other.
We did not reach a peak, only to decline and die.
We have been as drops of water,
born in the ocean and sprinkled on the earth in a gentle rain.
We became a spring, and then a stream,
and finally a river flowing deeper and stronger,
nourishing all it touches, as it nears its home once again.
Don't accept the modern myths of aging. You are not declining.
You are not fading away into uselessness.
You are a sage, a river at its deepest and most nourishing.
Sit by a river bank some time, and watch attentively as the river
tells you of your life.
- Lao Tzu (translation by William Martin)
Best to you all,
Jerry Allen, WeavingCommunity.substack.com