The Groaning Board

Another Thanksgiving, the great American feast, has come and gone again. Last year we got together with friends, each bringing a dish to a scenic house in the woods with a roaring fire. This year we had a nice little one at home, a turkey roasted with herbs fresh from the garden. My garden isn't large enough to provide much more than herbs and carrots for the table on turkey day. I have to visit the greater garden of the farmer's market and even the grocery store. Now that the leftovers are stored and dishes washed I have some time to share a few of my thoughts from this last week about feasting and what it has meant to humans through the ages.

The myth of the first Thanksgiving is as deeply ingrained in our culture as the myth surrounding those colonists who found their way to Plymouth, Massachusetts. For the pilgrims a day of thanksgiving meant giving thanks to god, usually through fasting and prayer, only rarely followed by a feast. After the colonies of New England grew, public holidays or days of thanksgiving were declared in honor of battle victories, those back home across the sea and those won against Native Americans. What is often taken as the first thanksgiving was part of a period of peaceful gestures by one tribe of Native Americans seeking an alliance with the early settlers, sharing food in the spirit of peace and a demonstration of goodwill towards new friends. It is an ancient action full of grace and hope, symbolic of bringing together new members of a family by sharing a meal. This generous spirit is what we tend to focus on today when we gather around a heaped and groaning table in late November.

But our modern Thanksgiving is more than a modest and symbolic meal, the volume of food on the table and the late fall timing always make me think of pagan harvest festivals. I think of other feasts too; the rugged Greeks in Homer's Odyssey, slaughtering beeves and offering wine to the gods, the Romans lounging in great halls around tables of decadence, and kings and queens feasting in drafty castles on boar taken from the surrounding forest. There are thousands more, feasts going back further than literature and known history.

Here we are in the twenty-first century gorging on turkey then digesting all afternoon in front of an enormous television, still gathered together for the feast.