The Turkey Trot and the Power of Secular Ritual
on secular ritual, revision, communal activities, and giving thanks
Two years ago I spent my annual Saturday-after-Thanksgiving layover alone at the nicest restaurant I could find in the Las Vegas airport, eating a barely passable piece of salmon and texting with Ben, with whom I would go on my first real date back in Los Angeles the following day. I was on my way home from my aunt’s house in DuPage County, Illinois, where my East Coast nuclear family and I have convened for Thanksgiving since I moved to California five years ago. Thanksgiving in the western suburbs of Chicago? I could sense his skepticism. Three years of law school in Chicago had been enough time in the Midwest for Ben, who knew the city well enough to know that the western suburbs connote procreation, conformity, McMansions, and, well, a general lack of edge. And yet, a childless bohemian Californian was telling him that her favorite day of the year begins with running a 5K under a cold grey sky and ends with dancing in the garage to her uncle’s record collection.
My love for my family’s newfound Thanksgiving Day road race tradition was even more out-of-character than Ben could have known. I do not like crowds. I don’t really like group activities of any sort. I have a general aversion to parades, music festivals, sporting events—any large-scale gathering that, to me, seems like an uncomfortable reminder of the human susceptibility to fascism and mass hysteria, particularly when attendees are dressed alike or chanting together. In recent years, I confess this discomfort has even made me squirmy during the collective recitation of the pledge of allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer. And now in the pandemic with the risk of contagion, the crowd has acquired a new literal element of danger that has made me all the more prone to avoid stadiums and protests. And yet somehow, 2021 marks the fifth year in which the highlight of my year was the 32 minutes spent running a Thanksgiving Day 5k with my family and tens of thousands of midwesterners dressed in matching race day shirts, this year with Ben by my side for the first time.
The story of how I came to love running a Thanksgiving road race is bound up in the fact that I did not always love Thanksgiving. As a child, my family of four spent Thanksgiving at my grandparents’ house in Connecticut. Thanksgiving was a stiff and formal dining room table affair, but then again, so was every meal at my grandparents’ house. Most years, it was just the six of us, and our Thanksgiving celebrations looked nothing like those I saw in the movies—no family touch-football games, casseroles, or folding tables. I was often in a funk, since making it to my grandparents’ house by midday required leaving our house in New Jersey before the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and missing the ensemble performances from Rent and CATS. Once at my grandparents’ house two hours away, I would sulk in the front room by the fire, reading Nancy Drew mysteries on the leather sofa (in the later years, back issues of Vanity Fair), while my grandmother cooked and my mother puttered around her. My grandfather’s Vivaldi would crackle over the stereo while the inhalation of wood smoke gave me a headache and lulled me asleep on the couch. I would be roused by my mother at sunset, who with dictatorial ferver would send me outside to march around the crunchy frosted lawn to dispel my grogginess and grumpiness before the dinner that, even for my grandparents’ house, was especially kid-unfriendly.
That we can’t change our families, even as we change, is one of the foundational lessons of adulthood. How many of us find ourselves playing into the same old dysfunctional dynamics when we return home and reverting to our short-tempered 18-year-old selves? At the same time, I noticed holidays beginning to feel hollow and performative as my family’s childhood traditions faded into irrelevance in my teens and early twenties. My interest in watching Broadway musical performances dimmed and I became more concerned with finding ways to work up an appetite on a day that the gym was closed. Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day began to feel virtually indistinguishable—occasions to polish the silver and dust off the china and eat a meal that had taken my mother days to prepare in under thirty minutes. Especially after my maternal grandparents died, the recreation of Thanksgiving around my parents’ dining room table felt more like a seance than a celebration. My mother’s efforts to prepare the table and the feast just as my grandmother had was a loving tribute to our matriarch, but it felt like we were going through the motions. Couldn’t we at least try adding some pancetta to the brussel sprouts?
My move to California in 2016 coincided with the sale of my grandparents’ house. While none of us will ever forget the sound of pulling into the gravel driveway or the sight of my grandfather standing sentry in a tweed bleezer at the backdoor, I think it was losing that traditional gathering place that finally gave my family permission to reconceive Thanksgiving. I can’t remember precisely how it came about, but it was decided that, in part to spare me the long trip home to Connecticut, we would meet in the middle of the country to celebrate Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house. To fly to Chicago for a few days required effort, expense, and planning. That making it to Thanksgiving was suddenly a labor of love imbued the holiday with new meaning. There was something exhilarating about everyone arriving in Chicago separately, and descending on my aunt’s house late on Tuesday night and assembling together for the first time in months. Something about traveling individually and crossing the threshold into the neutral territory of my aunt’s house allowed me to retain my hard-won identity as an independent adult, and, for the first time, to not take togetherness for granted.
Thanksgiving, I have come to realize, is a holiday for adults. As a student, receiving a meager two days off from school in the lead-up to exams felt unremarkable in comparison to the longer end-of-semester Christmas vacation. But as an adult, the two consecutive days off adjacent to a weekend now constitute the longest regular break from work afforded to me by my workplace and Thanksgiving has earned its place as the major holiday of my holiday season. And unlike so many other holidays (Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter, Halloween—even Passover and its search for the afikomen), there are no gifts or games associated with Thanksgiving, no rituals in which we place children at the center. There is just gratitude, a virtue which is difficult for children. So is dressing up and sitting at the table for a long time, to enjoy a meal that centers around root vegetables and other unfamiliar dishes that appear only once a year (stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie.) Thanksgiving requires gratitude for the abstract—health and bounty and togetherness—and any number of luxuries that plenty of American families do not necessarily share. It is no wonder then, that the myth of Thanksgiving that is taught to children in schools—a magical harvest feast offered to the Pilgrims by the Native Americans— is a lie.
In the time that I have fallen in love with Thanksgiving, the legitimate critique of Thanksgiving as an official whitewashing of our country’s imperialist and genocidal origins has reached the mainstream. This year, my Instagram algorithm fed me ample content about how to teach Thanksgiving to children, advice I will look at more closely when it is my turn to decide how to participate in the process of national mythmaking with the next generation.
But it bears noting that Thanksgiving was once understood to be about something more complicated and nuanced than gratitude for a bountiful harvest. When he declared Thanksgiving a national holiday to be celebrated on the final Thursday in November in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln actually framed Thanksgiving as a day for not only giving thanks, but for offering penitence for “our national perverseness and disobedience” and for praying to God to heal “the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”1
A few weeks ago, the brilliant Tressie McMillan Cottom interviewed writer Kiese Laymon on The Ezra Klein Show. Their discussion of the craft of writing allows for a powerful conversation about race and life in America through the lens of revision—the importance of the willingness of the writer to engage in the revision process and to believe that her work can always be better, but also the importance of willingness to revisit—and revise—beliefs, perspectives, and relationships. Cottom leads the conversation to a poignant crescendo, asking “[h]ow could we value revision in a nation whose entire story is about resisting revision?”
Despite Thanksgiving’s sordid origins, the problematic perpetuation of the Pilgrim mythology, and our nation’s failure to even barely reckon with the fact that our country was built on stolen land and genocide, I am left believing that if there is any holiday worth salvaging, it is Thanksgiving. I appreciate that the gratitude at the center of Thanksgiving is not one felt by all the peoples who inhabit this land. But ultimately, Thanksgiving is non-religious, non-patriotic, and, unlike most holidays, allows for personal meaning-making. What would it mean to revise our relationship to Thanksgiving as a nation, to return to Lincoln’s original framing of Thanksgiving as a day for humility, to accept our nation’s wounds and failures?
In the post-Trump pandemic era, it is rare that I feel in solidarity with a group of Americans. Indeed, it is rare that I participate in any sort of collective ritual or routine now that I don’t go to school or religious services or yoga classes or even an office. For most of my life, singing in harmony in a choirs and a cappella groups was my most regular sacred method of connecting with others. This year, the Thanksgiving Day 5k was, I suppose, the first collective activity in which I have participated in months, if not years. I don’t want to suggest that I believe a turkey trot will heal our nation’s intractable wounds—I don’t, and had this been an indoor activity, I would have been reluctant to attend without the sorts of mask and vaccine mandates that have driven us even further into our camps. But there is something undeniably powerful about participating in something with a group, in an activity that generates goodwill towards the collective in the witnessing of each other’s sincere joy and being carried along by the energy of a crowd.
Rituals are intrinsically powerful. They help mark the passage of time, and as I felt while lighting the menorah last night, they can help us feel connected to those who have preceded us and to those who will outlive us. That is why, I now understand, we eat turkey on Thanksgiving with my great-grandparents’ silver. But it took a reimagining of Thanksgiving for eating turkey with my great-grandparents’ silver to spiritually resonate with me. If we are to truly revise our relationship to Thanksgiving and consider embracing it as a day for “humble penitence,” the revision of our personal and cultural rituals is all the more urgent. In order to be able to look inward and backward on Thanksgiving, I learned I needed the day to begin with a looking outward and forward, with a connection to the world and to others beyond what my family’s traditional holiday at my grandparents’ house had allowed for. Running with others for a mere 32 minutes a year will not heal the torn fabric of our nation, but this year especially, reminded me why, throughout human history, we have made rituals out of doing things together.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/transcript_for_abraham_lincoln_thanksgiving_proclamation_1863.pdf