Turkeys and a Tickle Me Elmo

By: Luis A. Oviedo
Contributing Writer

While we all sat and ate ourselves into a coma over this Thanksgiving break, I was reminded of what this holiday really is about: true American values such as gluttony and 60 percent off at Kohl’s. I saw kids coming back home wearing cheesy paper hats with buckles attached to them (modeling the buckle craze of the early 1600’s) and reading small books cut in social studies classes which told the story of the Pilgrims who came and seemed to be innocent people who struggled in a new, already-inhabited but somehow controlled by some foreign power and natives who helped them in their survival of a really bad winter and they shared food and somehow the story trails off and we are here today eating turkey and cranberry sauce with the can ridges on it as God intended it to be.

This insane holiday, the mark of the Christmas holiday shopping season, is filled with controversy and insane fighting over something which defines Americans as a resilient people. But it is harder to sell the idea of this holiday if you say that they were not the first and it did not officially become a holiday practiced on a Thursday in November until President Franklin D. Roosevelt made it so because the national retail dry goods association pressured him to make it this date.

Thanksgiving is a holiday steeped in backroom deals and other sad political dealings which do indeed make this an American holiday. Leave it to the Americans to make a holiday about the need for more time off so people can do more shopping. We also neglect that later on, the same group that helped these people survive gets pushed off their own land and begins the slaughter of the natives of this land which was once their home. Who knew that turkey had brain-altering drugs that help us drown our transgressions in sleepiness and stuffing?

People who tell the real story say the event happened only once and sporadically at best after that, and that the date of this event has been December 26, 1850, November 30th, November 23rd and other assorted dates.

It took Congress to put an end to the discussion of what date it is and that no matter what is said that it is historically a day which gives thanks to a Christian God. This is a much harder sell, and I will bet even the most brilliant business student will have a hard time selling the real story. However, it is saturated in so much myth that it is very hard for people to hear the real story, and many people will tell you that you are un-American if you tell the truths about this holiday.

I have read articles which believe that teachers who teach the real story are teaching children to hate their country and be un-American. Who knew that telling the truth was un-American? Who knew that being accurate and knowing real history was un-American? Who knew that it was American to accept what we are taught and that we do not question who we are in a country that has questioned everything we have done in our existence?

We do not hear about Native Americans who see it as a day of mourning or the people who tell the real story about the first and many other Thanksgivings in this country.

Why is this holiday protected by so many people? Is it because it is held together by lies and stuffing and if this is wrong what else is and if this is something that defines us as American and we come to find out it is a lie then who are we?

How can we be a nation without a proper narrative? How do we connect a country without myths and legends to show and be torch-bearers for our own beliefs?

That is the reason for this holiday: the turkey that binds us all in the idea that we are American and that, like those pilgrims we are God-fearing, thankful and resourceful and we are able to persevere through insurmountable odds (in an effort to find that Tickle Me Elmo X our children have been whining about since Halloween.)