Don’t Let Thanksgiving Be Squeezed Out of the Calendar

N ear the end of Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s puzzling 2020 time-travel actioner, the protagonists execute what they call a “temporal pincer movement” against their enemies. In the world of the movie, people can move both forward and backward through time. So the forces of good attack from both chronological directions, hoping to surround their enemy in the timestream.

Something similar is happening in America today. The target is not an enemy but one of our greatest holidays. And it may disappear entirely if we don’t fight for its rightful place on the calendar.

I speak, of course, of Thanksgiving. The holiday’s roots extend to the prehistory of the American nation, with a 1621 harvest feast celebrated by Plymouth Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians. Similar celebrations were held informally throughout early America, encouraged by Presidents George Washington and James Madison and then formalized in Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation. Lincoln urged his fellow citizens to set “aside the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

The trappings of the Thanksgiving holiday developed organically thereafter. There are events outside the home. Football on Thanksgiving Day goes back to the beginnings of the sport itself. Buffalo, N.Y., held the first Thanksgiving Day race in 1896. Philadelphia held the first Thanksgiving Day parade in 1920; Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City followed in 1924. As one of his many misguided measures to combat the Great Depression, the dread tyrant FDR tried moving Thanksgiving up in 1939; in 1941, Congress established the holiday as the fourth Thursday in November. President Harry Truman was the first to pardon the Thanksgiving turkey in 1947.

And then there’s what takes place inside. As a nod to the holiday’s origins, standard Thanksgiving fare is plain, the sort of victuals a typical farmstead could have obtained and prepared relatively easily: turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, and pumpkin pie. Families assemble in various combinations and to varying degrees of awkwardness and affection; arguments about politics are possible though hardly mandatory. After the meal and the cleanup, many — on account of the hearty spread — are content to slouch lazily about, dipping in and out of assorted conversations and football games. Perhaps the more ambitious will venture outside for a touch-football game of their own; those who do not will happily watch. It is, on the whole, a low-key holiday, and delightfully so. As Jim Geraghty wrote in a 2008 post that I read fondly at the time and recall lovingly each year, “Thanksgiving seems like Christmas stripped down to the latter’s most essential and enjoyable parts — good food, a quick prayer, and family too long unseen around a table.”

Christmas has long threatened to encroach upon Thanksgiving’s turf. There’s no denying that it has a longer historical pedigree. It is also celebrated in other countries, unlike the distinctly American Thanksgiving. There are, moreover, the commercial pressures. The Christmas season is essential for retailers, starting with “Black Friday,” which has become hugely important for them.

But it seems to me that, in recent years, this “Christmas creep” has gotten worse. Commercial and cultural entities that once had sufficient restraint to wait until mid November to inaugurate Yuletide can now barely wait until the day after Halloween. In New York City, Christmas decorations were already going up in early November, by which time at least one FM radio station in the nation’s capital had become all-Christmas all the time. Washington’s Union Station was already bearing its Christmastime giant wreaths.

A more novel part of the holiday pincer movement is the attack from Halloween. Decorations for that holiday seem to be going up earlier and becoming more elaborate and lurid. The macabre Halloween vibe is inching back toward Labor Day and even lingering after Halloween itself; skeletons and witches are barely down when, pre-Thanksgiving, the Christmas lights and inflatable reindeer are going up. The space to anticipate Thanksgiving is shrinking from this direction as well, as Halloween comes to dominate fall.

It’s not surprising. Both ends of the pincer are cultural heavyweights. Halloween has the entire horror genre, costumes and decorations, trick-or-treating, and its own set of standards, such as the “Monster Mash” and “Thriller.” And Christmas has its own genre of music, the commercialized Coca-Cola version of the holiday layered atop the authentic Christian one, and presents. Thanksgiving can seem meek in comparison. It has — what? Simple food, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and “Alice’s Restaurant”? (And maybe “Over the River and Through the Wood.”)

But Thanksgiving’s unforced simplicity is at the root of its appeal and value. It is a humble holiday, and one that should in turn inspire humility. It is a time of gratitude for some of the basic things that truly matter but sometimes are taken for granted. A roof over one’s head. A family to love. Food to eat. America. By orienting us toward these things, the holiday binds us not only to their continuity but to that of tradition and life itself. And it is a time to recall, amid life’s many ups and downs, that “some things don’t change, and thank God for that,” as Jim wrote.

It’s a holiday that deserves its special place on the calendar. We shouldn’t let it get swallowed up by a temporal pincer movement by the giants on either side of it. Its spirit, especially, is timeless, and ought not to be neglected. So this year, celebrate it heartily. And in the coming years, keep the other holidays in their proper place. To everything, there is a season. But only one.