We should all be grateful that Thanksgiving is no longer celebrated as in the olden days, in the traditional American ways. People who are stuck in gridlock this week, on highways, in airports or within their own intestines, may grumble, but Miss Manners can assure them that things used to be worse.
She realizes how disorienting this is to those given to deploring our cultural and moral deterioration as evidenced by the debased celebrations of patriotic and religious holidays as occasions for self-indulgence. Didn't Thanksgiving used to be a day in which pious folk celebrated peace with wholesome food?
Would our kindergarten teachers have lied to us?
Let us say, rather, that they put a kindly and valiant spin on customs that would now come under their own zero-tolerance policies.
Fortunately, there is enough doubt about which was the first real Thanksgiving to allow for the development of those comprehensible narratives we call history. The Pilgrims have captured the role in popular entertainment, with the Puritans as their understudies, especially after the population could no longer tell them apart. But in anticipation of the modern custom of extolling diversity by having each segment of the population vie for credit, serious claims were also made by the French Huguenots in Florida, the Spanish in Texas, the English in Virginia, and the folks (excluding the summer people) in Maine.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, life was rough enough in all those places to inspire settlers to proclaim days of thanks to God whenever the routine torments of nature gave them a respite, which was not often. Thanksgiving for having vanquished enemies was also common -- as common, that is, as the thankers' victories -- and anticipatory thanks were offered on credit for help with future vanquishing.
That last custom, along with its milder but also historic application to team sports, we have more or less maintained. Others we have let lapse.
While we prate of good fellowship as a defining element of Thanksgiving, we overlook a stunning feature of the Pilgrims' Thanksgiving, which was a show of arms. The three-day Plymouth version of the first Thanksgiving featured hunting and target practice as a way of demonstrating their prowess in case their native guests had ideas about displacing them. Turkeys and targets continued to be shot at Thanksgiving celebrations up until the mid-19th century, when Americans were busy giving thanks for shooting one another.
True, the modern Thanksgiving features family bickering, from which full-fledged feuds sometimes emerge. But that is hardly the same thing.
Overeating is another comparatively tepid custom of ours. Early settlers were rarely lucky enough to have the chance, which is why they were truly thankful for a good harvest, while we are more likely to complain about being stuffed. Public carousing and drunkenness, such as we have relegated to Spring Break week, routinely characterized their celebrations. Begging is another traditional American Thanksgiving custom, lasting until the 1930s, when it was replaced -- by presidential proclamation, in the interest of the economy -- by shopping. We have now pushed both begging and Christmas shopping back to Halloween.
Having thus thrown off the shackles of the past, we are left with a charming holiday of feasts and families. And for that, Miss Manners is thankful.
DEAR MISS MANNERS: Two or three times a year, I am invited to dinner at a friend's parents' home, usually for informal family affairs.
I am almost never offered a beverage by my host, hostess or their daughter. I suspect they mean for everyone to help themselves, but I feel uncomfortable hauling open the refrigerator and grabbing something. What is the proper thing to do in such a situation?
GENTLE READER: Try pathos. Miss Manners is afraid that it is the only polite method. Without authorization -- something along the lines of "There are soft drinks in the refrigerator if anyone wants them" -- your hosts' failure to be hospitable does not justify breaking into their supplies.
The one request that is always proper is for water. You put your hand to your throat, assume an apologetic look (brows knitted over a sad little smile) and say, "I'm sorry, but I'm terribly thirsty. Could I trouble you for a glass of water?"
With any luck, they will ask if you would prefer something else, but this might even shake loose the general permission to help yourself.
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