'Let All Your Thinks Be Thanks'

An appreciation of an adult holiday.

BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
Thursday, November 22, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST


Conventional wisdom has it that Thanksgiving is the best of all American holidays. As a contrarian, I'd like to put that wisdom to the test.

Thanksgiving does have the absence of the heavy hand of dreary gift giving that has put the groans in Christmas, the moans in Hanukkah. And no one has written treacly Thanksgiving songs, comparable to "White Christmas" and "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire," which, I suspect, have helped make Christmas one of the prime seasons for suicide. Let us not speak of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," of whose travail we shall all have heard more than our fill as we ride up elevators and pass along the aisles of department stores.

For some time in America we have, of course, been living under Kindergarchy, or rule by children. If children do not precisely rule us, then certainly all efforts, in families where the smallish creatures still roam, are directed to relieving their boredom if not (hope against hope) actually pleasing them.

Let us be thankful that Thanksgiving has not yet fallen to the Kindergarchy, as has just about every other holiday on the calendar, with the possible exceptions of Yom Kippur and Ramadan. Thanksgiving is not about children. It remains resolutely an adult holiday about grown-up food and drink and football.

The weather, which provides the backdrop to Thanksgiving, is also much in its favor. In most parts of the country cool, sometimes cold, it doesn't usually blow the holiday away with tornados, hurricanes or great snow storms. Warm jackets, sweaters, corduroy trousers are the order of the day--comfort clothes, the sartorial equivalent of comfort food.

Comfort food is what Thanksgiving provides, and to the highest possible power. Large browned turkeys, rich heavy stuffings, sweet potatoes, cranberries . . . but enough of this gastronomic porno. Everyone has in mind his or her own memories of splendid Thanksgiving dinners.

My own are those my late mother-in-law used to give at her house on a small lake in Michigan. She was a dab cook, everything fresh, handsomely set out, perfectly prepared, without the least bit of pretension. She invited her extended family, roughly 20 of us, most of whom drove up from Chicago.

The dominant figure at these dinners was a large, ebullient, red-faced man named John Lull, the second husband of my wife's Aunt Phoebe. John was at what Mencken once called "the country-club stage of culture": A man who lived for golf and food and drink, had an eye for women. At first sight, he was your homme moyen sensuel, except there was nothing very moyen about his sensuality, which was pretty damn extraordinary. Diet, cholesterol, calories, these were words that I never heard pass his lips.

Thanksgiving dinners at my mother-in-law's always ended with a choice of three pies: pumpkin, mincemeat and apple. John would choose a large slice of the apple, requesting a slice of cheese placed atop it, whereupon, with a goofy smile he would announce, with a regularity as if it were part of a liturgy, "Pie without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze."

Pro football on television from Detroit on Thanksgiving is a remnant of the old patriarchy. (The patriarchy as we know is now all but dead, and those of us who retain fond if dimming memories of it have, alas, nothing left to fight for but the double standard.) Detroit regularly used to play Green Bay in these Thanksgiving games, and my memory of them is of famous quarterbacks, Bobby Lane, Tobin Rote, Bart Starr, eluding oncoming bruisers to complete impossible passes that won games in their final seconds.

An aging couch potato--au gratin, to be sure--I still watch these Thanksgiving games. Not having a horse in the race--I am a Chicago Bears fan--I view them with a fine detachment, noting changes in the game since I long ago began wasting my time watching it, among them the advent of 6-foot-6-inch quarterbacks, the 300-plus pound linemen, the human equivalents of SUVs.

Thanksgiving also has inclusiveness going for it. The holiday really is for all Americans, though I suppose a sourpuss leftist might, with boring trenchancy, be able to interject it isn't such a fine day for Native Americans.

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While secular in tone, Thanksgiving is also slightly religious in spirit. I am having Thanksgiving this year at the home of my son and daughter-in-law, and because of the slight religious nature of the holiday have asked them not to invite Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens or any of the rest of the atheist gang, all of whom seem likely, if on the premises, to put a dampening spirit onto the proceedings.

I wish the poet W. H. Auden were still alive, so that he might be at the same table where I eat my Thanksgiving dinner. Auden, I think, nicely captured the spirit of Thanksgiving when he wrote that, in prayer, it is best to get the begging part over with quickly and get on to the gratitude part. He also wrote, "let all your thinks be thanks."

To be living in a prosperous and boundlessly interesting country, at a time of high technological achievement, and of widening tolerance --much to be thankful for here. "Wystan," I'd like to tell the poet, "you got it right, kid. Now how about a drumstick."

Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, of "In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary and Savage" (Houghton Mifflin, 2007).