(Progressive U) -Thanksgiving

Some holidays don’t make a lot of sense…
For instance, we celebrate Halloween before Thanksgiving; Halloween was once a pagan holiday to celebrate the harvest gathering of cut wheat. Today, it is celebrated by children (maybe some teens –might even by some hip adults) getting hyper and toilet-papering your house after ingesting little bundles of refined sugar (candy) handed out from strangers door to door in the suburbs.

Oh yeah… Before I get down about how thanksgiving came to being a lovely holiday, I would like to wish all of you guys a...

HAPPY (belated) THANKSGIVING!! :grin:

Now, in the U.S., it is an American custom (or should I say holiday) to celebrate Thanksgiving. For some people it is the time of the year where we show our gratitude to all of the people who have been kind to us -like our parents, friends, or classmates (for some -maybe teachers). It is also the time of the year where schools invite parents for a presentation of the first thanksgiving…

Every November, even though not all of the young children in schools across America know about the first thanksgiving, they present a short skit about it where some would dress-up like Native American Indians while some would portray the first “white” settlers in the New World (as most history books would call America).

They would illustrate how the Native American Indians welcomed the Pilgrims and how the Indians taught them agriculture to be able to survive. They also demonstrated how the Pilgrims are grateful to the Native Americans for helping them and to God for America –the land of the free where they can escape religious persecution. (By the way, the plays probably would not mention too much about “religious persecution;” nobody would want to spoil the holiday…)

However, this might seem a lovely skit but there’s more to it than meets the eye…
On the FIRST thanksgiving, the turkey might not have been as luscious, tasty-looking, and as humungous as most turkeys we have available for us in supermarkets. Also, the pilgrims or the first white settlers would not be as healthy-looking (or as good-intentioned) as those kids who are performing the play. Why? It is because they were disease-carriers to the New World and -as history as its witness -would "steal" the land from the native Indians.

But in the whole, I'm grateful for Thanksgiving; it's the time of the year that gives anybody an excuse to bury his/her face with lots and lots of food...