Thanksgiving, not Christmas, is the American holiday

Thanksgiving, not Christmas, is the American holiday.

The case for Thanksgiving

November is the month that proves it. The leaves are down, the air has the flat, clean smell of the first frost, and the days close in early enough that the kitchen light matters. The year's last harvest has come in — squash and pumpkins, cider apples, the dark collard row — and the whole country turns toward a table. On the fourth Thursday of the month, the federal offices close, schools close, and the day is given over to the table. The oven goes on before light. The turkey is brined or not, stuffed or not, roasted, smoked, or fried outdoors in a pot of oil, depending on the house. Gravy is made from the pan. There are two kinds of pie. A can of cranberry sauce, still ridged from the tin, holds its place at the edge of the plate. The meal is the thing itself.

The meal begins on this continent. The center of it is a New World bird; the beans, squash, and corn on the table are the old staples of the hemisphere; even the pumpkin is a North American fruit. Thanksgiving dinner takes the harvest of one particular soil and makes it a rite. Christmas dinner has many forms and many homelands. Thanksgiving dinner says where it is from.

The remembered origin is a New England one. The schoolhouse version says that in Plymouth, in the seventeenth century, the English settlers and the Wampanoag ate a harvest feast together. The record is partial, and the telling has been rubbed smooth by time. But the country returns to that scene because it wants a story in which strangers sit down at one table. Every fourth Thursday, that story is enacted: family from opposite coasts, a guest from another country, the neighbor who has nowhere else to go, all pulling up chairs. Thanksgiving is a ritual of invitation. Christmas, for all its warmth, is a ritual of household. Thanksgiving is the one that opens the door.

It is also the one federal holiday that does not require a belief. A congregation has its solemnities; a family with no church has none of the unease. The American calendar now includes celebrations from many religions, but Thanksgiving belongs to no denomination. It demands no gift list and no wrapping paper. It is one Thursday, with one table, and there is nothing to do but cook, travel, and sit down. That is why it has survived in every kind of American household — in a rented room, in a nursing home dining hall, at a shelter that serves turkey to whoever comes.

The case against Christmas

Christmas pushes back with the whole weight of the season. It owns December and has annexed a good part of November; the strings of lights go up before all the leaves have been raked. It has sound — the carols, the commercials, the pop songs. It has a tree, a star, a stocking, a red-suited figure, and a story every American child knows by the age of three. It is the holiday around which the year's money turns, the one the stores and the calendars treat as the deadline. Christmas has a month of anticipation, and the anticipation itself is a kind of national habit. Thanksgiving has one day, and the day is over in a long afternoon.

But the case against Thanksgiving rests on size, not on character. Christmas is bigger because it can be all things at once: a religious feast, a winter festival for the irreligious, a children's fantasy, an office party, a reason to travel, a delivery date for the mail. It has been made American by accumulation — the evergreen tree from the German custom, the gift list from the department store, the red-suited Santa who enters through the chimney, the palms wrapped in lights beside a California freeway. It is the holiday of the republic's energy, its appetite and its clutter, and it has the momentum of a month behind it.

But size is not the test. The test is what the holiday looks like when the season changes. Christmas is observed in some form on every continent; its imagery crosses borders; its songs are sung all over the world. Thanksgiving is the opposite. It has never become a season. It remains one Thursday in November, and even the versions that appeared elsewhere keep a different date and a different table. It cannot be understood in the abstract. It lives in the actual particular of a bird in the oven, a table that eats two leaves, and the two kinds of pie that produced a real argument about which one gets the last piece.

And the proof is the hour after the meal is over. On Christmas, the day is sometimes a storm of want and letdown — paper on the floor, a battery that has to be found, an afternoon that stretches too long. On Thanksgiving, the last plate has been scraped, the pie has been cut, and the table has turned into a field of crumbs and coffee rings. The adults sit with their knees under the table. The football game blurts from the other room. Nobody has anywhere else to be. The sun is already going down, and the whole country, from the New England kitchen to the California patio, is having the same slow afternoon. The turkey carcass waits on the counter, and it will be picked over until it is only bone.