So today was the big ol Turkey Day in the good ol’ US of A. I’ve been pretty anti- “Thanksgiving- THE HOLIDAY” for quite a few years. The whole “Pilgrims’ Pride”, thing- you know-fucking over an indigenous people the way it went down hasn’t really floated my boat since I grew up and learned what they didn’t teach us in school about the rape of this continent’s original folks.
Now here is the “but”.
But being a pagan witch woman, who does move and flow with the wheel of the year, and being a somewhat hidebound gal who adores tradition (as well as creating new family traditions), we have our own version of “Thanksgiving”. It is no accident that we celebrate it in the fall, when the harvest season is upon us. Historically harvest celebrations are a time for gratitude. After all, a good crop meant there would be enough food to carry a family or community through the winter. That’s something to be grateful for, right? The prospect of not starving would have made folks pretty thankful. Making it through a growing season with enough rainfall, (but not too much), no crop scourges like locusts or other pest and diseases, enough strong and willing bodies to get the harvest in before it rotted in the fields…
We don’t always think of this, many of us, when we buy our produce at the supermarket, and can get fruits and vegetables that are out of season as long as we’re willing to pay an arm and a leg for them; after all, with modern transportation and green-houses any time is harvest time. Automatic watering systems, water that has been diverted by dams and carried by aqueducts to places like Southern California that were intended by nature to be scrub deserts, pesticides for bugs, herbicides for “weeds” (weeds, by the way, are really just plants that grow where you don’t want them to), plants that have been genetically altered to grow differently, to not reproduce as nature intended… blah, blah-blah, blah-blah. You get the point.
I don’t even come close to growing the bulk of my family’s food, but I do try to be mindful of what we consume and the price the earth pays, and ultimately we pay, for our consumption. So, to make a long story longer, what I’m trying to say is that we do celebrate the Harvest season as a time to be grateful for the natural bounty of the Mother (earth), and since the rest of the US celebrates Thanksgiving today and this weekend it’s convenient to have our celebration now, too.
Our garden, I’m afraid, hasn’t had the time and attention it deserves since we lost our Lil Pharoah. In times past folks wouldn’t have had the luxury of letting something so important go in the name of grief, but there it is. We had our first freeze last night, so the turnips will be sweet whenever we wish to harvest them (we’ll probably let some of them at least grow to be monstrous!) We have been enjoying our various lettuces and baby greens, and last week harvested the tops of the turnips and cooked up a huge pot of southern style turnip greens cooked with bacon and onions. The snow peas are yummy and the pod peas are getting fat, although I’m afraid we were too late on the broccoli planting; nary a head in sight. We’ll see.
As for our celebration, I suppose we did the best we could. It sounds terrible to say that we all feel like there’s not much to be grateful for, but there it is; that’s how it feels. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it’s not the gratitude that’s not there- we’re all grateful for each other and everything we do have- we’re just so incredibly hyper aware of what we don’t have- our precious Egyptian Prince, that it pretty much casts a pall on any thought of “celebration”. This should have been his first Thanksgiving. It’s THAT, above all, that is the awful truth that lives in us all, I think. I know that Yule/christmas will be the same, as will New Years and Valentine’s Day and Easter…
So perhaps the way to speak of today, and of the coming holidays, these that should have been our Bishop’s “firsts”, is to name them “gatherings” rather than celebrations. That’s what we did today. We gathered together, our little broken family. We shared the day at Fawn and Aaron’s home. They cooked the turkey, made the stuffing and all the fixins (well, a much shaved down list of the usual fixins… I’m afraid we didn’t have the heart for the days of prep we usually put into the Harvest celebration). We cooked and ate and just gathered together. We held. I am grateful for that, today; that we could be together and hold.
