Month: November 2013

Thanksgiving and the first day of Hanukkah overlap this year:

Back in 1888—the only other time Hanukkah and Thanksgiving converged—the weekly Jewish American newspaper, The American Hebrew, “encouraged readers to enthusiastically embrace both holidays, because Hanukkah is itself a holiday of Thanksgiving,” says Dianne Ashton, author of the recently published book, Hanukkah in America: A History. The message was, “when it’s Thanksgiving, you can completely join in with American society” to celebrate this ecumenical holiday, she says. “But not with Christmas, because it is a Christian holiday.”

Ultimately, “Thanksgiving is a civic holiday with spiritual overtones,” says Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis. Regardless of your religion or lack of faith, the holiday “speaks to gratitude, to forces greater than ourselves, and calls upon us to help others,” she points out.

Allison Benedikt is not a fan:

Because my favorite thing about Thanksgiving is that it’s secular.

I know, I know, we’re supposed to be giving thanks to “our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens,” as Abe Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation establishing the holiday put it. But for most Americans, Thanksgiving is not a religious holiday. It is a food and football holiday. We eat, drink, watch parades, argue about politics, and give thanks. In my family, at least, the gratitude is secular—we give thanks to each other. The most common choked-up toast at the table: “I’m just so lucky to have all of you.” I don’t want my religion or anyone else’s pulling up a seat.

Some of this is because I am intermarried. I cannot tell you what a relief it is to have this one major holiday—the best one!—that isn’t in some part about what I am and my husband is not (Jewish), or what he is and I’m not (Christmas-celebrating). Given the latest survey of American Jews—58 percent of whom are intermarried—I suspect we are not alone in those feelings. Thanksgiving, for all its colonialist origin-story problems, is the one great holiday where you don’t have to explain to your kids why Mom believes this and Dad believes that. One great holiday that all of your neighbors celebrate, regardless of background.

Which brings to mind a classic passage from Philip Roth’s American Pastoral:

[I]t was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff–no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people–one colossal turkey feeds all.  A moratorium on funny foods and funny ways and religious exclusivity, a moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion for the Christians, where everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year.  A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else.  It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.

Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute, is against shopping on Thanksgiving Day:

As a society, we’ve agreed that most of America’s workforce should have key holidays — in this case just one day — to be with family and friends, or just to take a breather from work. Holidays are also up there with vacation days as critical to keeping employees healthy and productive, more so than ever. Our research at the Families and Work Institute shows that the nation’s workforce is more stressed than ever, increasing significantly in recent years. Nearly one-third (32%) of employees report that their work has a primarily negative impact on their lives off the job by draining energy, so they don’t have enough left over for their personal and family life. Our research also shows that those who take vacations and holidays return to work more energized and productive. That’s why so many leading employers are encouraging time off for holidays and vacations.

In a statement, Macy’s said the decision to open on Thanksgiving was “in response to interest from customers who prefer to start their shopping early.” And it’s also true that it’s what some employees want as well, especially when retailers offer to pay time and a half, or when labor agreements include provisions for premium pay. But what I want to do is encourage people to look at the bigger work-life picture. Giving up our holidays can negatively impact our well-being and our personal and family lives. Creating traditions with our children and continuing traditions with our elders can also suffer. More important, it further erodes the already faint distinction between our work and our personal lives, and it’s a trend that just may move from retail to white collar jobs. After all, 50 years ago no one would have thought that professionals would be working nights and weekends, and we all know how that turned out.

Yglesias differs:

[I]n a diverse nation with more than 300 million citizens, opinions are going to vary on the pros and cons of extended business hours. How strapped for cash are you? Where does your family live? What’s your relationship with them like? How sentimental are you about specific holiday rituals? People will differ. This Thanksgiving there are going to be people with jobs at the Gap who wish they weren’t working Thanksgiving but feel that they’d lose their jobs if they weren’t willing to take an extra shift. There are also going to be people with jobs at Radio Shack who wish they could earn some extra cash and get out from under that credit card debt. I’m not persuaded that there’s a first-order question of social justice here one way or the other.

Nick Gillespie is pro-shopping:

Those of us who are old enough to recall little-remembered and even less-loved “blue laws” can only cheer the growth in 24/7 shopping. Dating back to the colonial times and religious in origin, blue laws severely limited whether stores could open at all on certain days of the year and what sorts of goods they could offer. Growing up in 1970s New Jersey, for instance, supermarkets could sell milk, bread, cold cuts, and other “necessities” on Sundays but whole aisles were literally roped off because the Sabbath was no day for frivolous purchases (especially of the alcoholic variety). Picking up furniture or clothes would have to wait til Monday.

Matthew Parris’s answer? “Playfulness”:

Doing pointless, purposeless things, just for fun. Doing things for the sheer devilment of it. Being silly for the sake of being silly. Larking around. Taking pleasure in activities that do not advantage us and have nothing to do with our survival. These are the highest signs of intelligence. It is when a creature, having met and surmounted all the practical needs that face him, decides to dance that we know we are in the presence of a human. It is when a creature, having successfully performed all necessary functions, starts to play the fool, just for the hell of it, that we know he is not a robot.

He recalls an vivid example from the time he and friends were looking at ancient cave art in the southeastern Sahara Desert. Amidst the usual buffaloes and gazelles, there was a series of five-dot clusters that confused them. Then a friend understood – “if he’d daubed them in paint, the fingers and thumb would have left five blobs just like the ones we had been puzzling over”:

All at once, it was clear. The bush people, lounging about after dark in their family shelter, perhaps around a fire – basically just hanging out – had been amusing themselves doing a bit of rock art. And perhaps with some leftover red paste, a few of the younger ones had had a competition to see who could jump highest and make their fingermarks highest up the overhang.

This was not even art. It called for no particular skill. It was just mucking about. And yet, for all the careful beauty of their pictures, for all the recognition of their lives from the vantage point of my life that was sparked in me by the appreciation of their artwork, it was not what was skilful that brought me closest to them. It was what was playful.

(Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt)