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There are many Thanksgiving traditions worthy of celebration: stuffing (some call it dressing) and gravy; potatoes – mashed and sweet; family and football; mulled wine and more mulled wine. But my favorite Thanksgiving tradition has to be The Poor Dinner Guest. The Poor Dinner Guest is not your ordinary poor dinner guest. To spoil a dinner party, a guest need only shine for a few hours. Toss three martinis back in a hurry, chew with your mouth open, scoff at the food, make a long, off-color joke, and throw in an unwanted advance, and Voila! You have won the evening! But to stand out on Thanksgiving, you really have to pace yourself. It’s a marathon.
The classically-trained poor dinner guest will talk of religion or politics. These are oldies but goodies. Personally, I enjoy an unwelcome pre-meal prayer. I enjoy the sighs, the audible eye-rolling, the victimhood. I also enjoy the political angle, the regurgitated talking points presented as original thoughts. These tactics would suffice at an ordinary meal, but Thanksgiving is no ordinary meal.
So how does The Poor Dinner Guest spoil Thanksgiving?
There is a way. There is a topic so verboten, something that must not be uttered or even considered. There is one topic that supersedes religion or politics or even golf. This topic will instantly ruin the holiday for young and old alike. One Thanksgiving topic is, in a word, unforgivable.
The first rule of Thanksgiving is you do not talk about Thanksgiving!
You can, of course, talk about the incomplete version of Thanksgiving. You know, the version small children still reenact? Looking for a nice, new place to practice their Protestantism, Pilgrims came over from England, settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, needed help from the Indians. The Indians taught them how to plant corn and fish. Thanksgiving Dinner was shared. The End.
That version of the story is like a version of Pandora’s Box where Zeus sends a box to Pandora and Epimetheus. It’s a really nice box. Pandora and Epimetheus put the box on a shelf in the living room and it really ties the room together! The End.
There is, of course, more to the story.
The second rule of Thanksgiving is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT THANKSGIVING!
Look, if you want to be invited back to Thanksgiving next year, a good guest must not broach the White Lies. It’s fine to discuss the white lies, like how the Pilgrims were the first settlers. (They were? Really? Even though Europeans had been coming to the area for at least 100 years? I mean, there were already English-speaking Indians?! Did they learn English in correspondence courses?)
A White Lie, however, is bigger. The White Lie paints the Pilgrims as Protestant, pious, moral, generous, benevolent. Wherein the actual record shows them to be something else. When the Pilgrims first arrived, the Wampanoag granted them land and helped them survive, then thrive. Without their help, the Pilgrims would have perished. A few decades later when the pendulum swung in the other direction and the Wampanoag people needed help, the Pilgrims pounced. The Pilgrims usurped land, manipulated them legally, and sentenced many to death. Ultimately, the Pilgrims forced the Wampanoag to make an impossible choice: starve, submit, or go to war.
The third rule of Thanksgiving is that if someone says stop, or taps out, or goes limp, YOU DO NOT BRING UP KING PHILLIP’S WAR!
It was a bloody war. Lots of people died. The Pilgrims win the war in about a year. These nice Protestants beheaded the queen of Wampanoag people and tormented their captured with it. A few days later they killed Pumetacom, the leader of the Wampanoag people. These thoughtful Christians dismembered him and hung his head on the entrance to Plymouth where it stayed for twenty years.
The Pilgrims sold many of the remaining Wampanoags into Caribbean slavery, keeping a few Indians for themselves, some as slaves. The lucky ones would be indentured servants.
Today Thanksgiving is a day of mourning for the Wampanoag people.
I wish I could promise you a Thanksgiving completely free of an actual, true Thanksgiving. But, I’m afraid, and you know this as well as I do, The Poor Dinner Guest is as much a holiday tradition as turkey and pumpkin pie. And now, thanks to David Silverman, Princeton PhD, author of “This Land is Their Land”, The Poor Thanksgiving Guest now knows the real story of Thanksgiving. Please pass the mulled-wine.
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