Thanksgiving in the past three years came and went by and I did not feel the festivity around it. To me, Thanksgiving was synonymous to Black Friday shopping. But last Thanksgiving was different for me, and it was because of a group of people, who shouldered all the trouble of cooking a traditional turkey meal for themselves and their friends.
There were baked turkey, mashed potato, sweet potato, corn, green peas, gravy, vegetable casserole, garlic bread and pumpkin pie on the menu. I ate to my heart’s and stomach’s content, it was my first traditional Thanksgiving meal after all. As I devoured the scrumptious food, I wondered if the first Thanksgiving celebrated by the natives and the Pilgrims, the first colonists to build permanent settlement in New England, had a similar menu. It turned out that the food served on the first Thanksgiving did not really have anything common with the kind of food cooked today. There are mixed opinions though. While some believe that the feast had deer and other food made using Native American spices and cooking methods, others believe that the exact menu is unavailable, yet another group of people believe that the first Thanksgiving meal featured duck, venison, corn, cabbage, seafood, squash and onions. Whatever the dishes were, baked or roast turkey certainly was not one of them.
Although Thanksgiving is treated as a secular holiday in the modern-day United States, this harvest celebration had religious connotations attached to it when it first began. Today, the day after Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the holiday shopping. The day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, draws millions of Americans (and Canadians from bordering provinces too) to stores and malls. According to the National Retail Federation, some 226 million shoppers spent more than $50 billion last Black Friday. An extension of this shopping spree is Cyber Monday, where retailers sell their products and services via their websites. According to comScore Inc., Cyber Monday sales hit $1.25 billion in 2011. The sales figures are massive.
Discounts offered by stores are generally massive too. Last Thanksgiving, a lot of people were talking about a 42” Sharp LCD TV that Best Buy, an electronics giant, was selling for just $200. People set up tents on the parking lots of Best Buy stores two days before the Black Friday sale began. The reason? The tent setters wanted to be the first ones to enter the stores and grab the LCD TVs.
For me, the 2011 Thanksgiving was not about shopping only but eating turkey and other good food. For the first time, I spent a meaningful Thanksgiving, a celebration that takes place across the United States by people regardless of their races, religions and nationalities.
By Wara Karim
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