Substack of the Ugh: Surviving Thanksgiving
The spells are at the bottom, but if you want inflammatory Thanksgiving discussion that's at the top!
I can’t speak to the mayo community beyond my own. I do want to ask if there is a family goddess named Dysfunctiona people pray to behind their fireplaces. It would explain a lot.
Title: Wild Turkey Author: Unknown Year:1864 Access Date: November 27, 2024 Publisher: Old Book Illustrations
Bear with me. Some of the discussion of Thanksgiving is unavoidably uncomfortable and demands a skewering of concepts almost sacred to US public schools.
Three Conversation Stoppers about Thanksgiving
(If making it awkward gets people to stop asking intrusive questions, this is for you.)
There exists a manuscript of Mabon: Recipes, Rituals, and Lore written by me that Llewellyn completely scrapped. What they wanted was something centered on English lore and Celtic tradition. That indeed happened by shifting the focus of the book to Michaelmas. Michaelmas was a Medieval Christian holiday and time of accounting, and the harvesting traditions were pretty cool. While writing the second book opened a side door to the animism that I live now, it didn’t quite have the meat and meaning that said Diana Wrote This.
The first book did. How was it different?
I shifted my attention from the somewhat crammed-in Welsh lore of Mabon to the meaning, intention, and impact of Mabon: gratitude. Survival. Community. Thanksgiving.
Here’s a synopsis of what I learned in the course of researching Mabon v.1:
Thanksgiving - usually called Harvest Celebration, Harvest Home, or some colloquial variation - was a movable European holiday practiced by even mainstream churches. Communities would bring harvest baskets of what they grew in their gardens, and the churches distributed those baskets in private to members of the community struggling for food. The exact time these banquets and harvest shares happened depended on the denomination and the weather that year. Some years, Harvest Home happened sooner than others.
The “Thanksgiving” belabored by every fifth-grade teacher in America, it turns out, was something of a lie. It seems that one political dinner during the fall got blown all out of proportion almost 200 years later, and Indigenous people have had to grind their teeth through misrepresentation ever since. It’s that much worse with the memories of the residential schools and recent grisly discoveries from them fresh in their minds. Learn more of the well-documented indigenous view from indigenous scholars with this article on Rethinking Thanksgiving Celebrations.
It’s in the Curriculum to Lie about Indigenous People and Thanksgiving
We play this clip every year before serving dinner.
Some see Thanksgiving as a recurring abuse of Native People. Given that the factually false lessons about American Indians are perpetuated in schools, usually around the time of this holiday, I agree that even though the real origins of US Thanksgiving did not involve natives, the current way the holiday has been mythologized is a form of abuse of native peoples.
I don’t know why the real origin of Thanksgiving was never taught, not even in my Advanced Placement history class in high school. It’s weird because it’s way better than that ridiculous Pilgrims and Indians business.
Abraham Lincoln declared the first official Thanksgiving on October 3, 1863. You can read his proclamation of Thanksgiving here. He established the day to order the scattered harvest holidays churches and religious subcultures in the US had at the time. He assigned an intent to it: to reunify the country after years of civil unrest.
Even though Thanksgiving in the US is an entirely secular holiday, it has religious and family underpinnings manifested in our family gathering expectations. I think most people couldn’t verbalize that the “see family” expectation came from Lincoln. I didn’t even learn about his role in Thanksgiving until my late 30s!
Indigenous folks had little, if anything, to do with the first Thanksgiving in the US. They just happened to get dragged into it during a phase of history when the wealthy wanted American lore and propaganda for bizarre reasons. Everything’s better with a story, especially if the truth makes you look bad, I suppose.
While I can’t speak to the white community beyond asking if there is a family goddess named Dysfunctiona people are praying to behind their fireplaces, I can say that its importance to the black community in the US makes absolute sense. To paraphrase the history, during the era of legal slaver in the US, slaves were often only allowed a day off for the Thanksgiving meals each year. When Thanksgiving was made official, it also became an important part of transmitting black culture to their families. You can read more about it, as documented by African American scholars and authors here.
There aren’t easy answers about observing Thanksgiving. Even with my reconnecting indigenous partner, my family chooses to honor the day. We look at it through the lens of ancestry: I had ancestors who fought for the US during the Revolutionary War on one side and ancestors who took refuge here in the 1930s when they saw World War II on the horizon. My mother’s side had significant land connections. My father’s side had significant city connections. My partner grew up in Appalachia, and their worldview extended from the region makes things of national importance also of personal importance. Thanksgiving is a national holiday, one in which we have power to guide outcomes through the energy we raise as we honor lands, waters, and roving birds.
How people celebrate Thanksgiving shows you whether they are solely family-centered or if they are more community-centered.
It is OK to like US Thanksgiving. It is OK to not like US Thanksgiving. Deciding what is most important to you in these situations is part of how you develop a moral and ethical system for yourself.
It might help stir (or redirect) dinner table conversation to talk about when other countries that have Thanksgiving celebrate it and how they do it. My understanding is that Canada has a lot of sales that day. Liberia gets up and dances. By all means, please tease the xenophobes.
Now that we’ve addressed the giant feathered dinosaur in the room, let’s talk about a few things you can do to keep family gatherings convivial:
Skip it.
Find a restaurant that serves Thanksgiving dinner and see if reservations are open. There will be less time for people to get mad, and you’ll be in public, which adds a degree of inhibition!
OK, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, if you go and you choose to resort to witchcraft:
Kitchen witchcraft: serving orange slices with a sprinkle of cardamom can boost people’s moods - and can help with low blood sugar. Talk to the orange and spice as you slice and present them about encouraging all those who see or consume them to be their very best selves.
If your family is prone to backbiting, gossip, and teardowns, then stop the gossip. The key ingredient: alum crystal. It’s a pickling spice that works great for stopping the backbite. Your grocery spice aisle usually has it. If you can magickally pre-game, grab a white jar candle (yes, a scented candle from Target is fine for this. Coconut, lime, or vanilla are ideal.) Take a sharpie, write the names of the worst gossip offenders on the candle, and surround it with a ring of alum crystal and light while imagining a mouth floating above it that keeps chomping on its tongue. You might also imagine a squirrel at the dinner table or picture everyone with silly hats. If you can laugh at the image, the energy of the laughter carries into the spell and how it lands.
Build a friendly atmosphere: Burning cinnamon incense or having a little simmer pot going with cinnamon, lemon, lime, and orange peel works. You need not have a pot on your stove - a tealight burner with a bowl will do and not take up stove space.
If you’re not hosting and preparing a dish, talk to the pumpkin spice mix (ask it nicely to help everyone chill) or shake in a little bit of star anise. Star anise can break obsessions, which can offset any ritually revisited arguments.
Sneak some carrots, lettuce, and onion outside and offer them to the turkey’s ancestors. Invite them to peacekeeping the humans. They’ll know what to do.
If you have some Bach Rescue Remedy, it’s untraceable in deviled eggs - and most people will eat deviled eggs first.
Happy Turkey Day. Enjoy this little gift, dashed off between pumpkin pies, calls to insurance adjusters, and studying.
Stay tuned this month for a few more goodies:
Prosperity Work with the Empress Card in Tarot
For Paid Subscribers only: A Mercury Retrograde Guide (late, as always, but practical)
Then, we will return to Substack of the Dead - why Christmas is the perfect time to use a Ouija board, and how A Christmas Carol is far more occult than just the ghosts!
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