The Daily: 21 November 2023

Last weekend, it was cold and wet outside, with blowing snow and ice. The porch wind chimes were never silent. So despite having a bit more garden work to do before winter really settles in, I did the only sensible thing and began the holiday cooking.

The cranberry sauce is done. I baked my usual loaf of sourdough, but there is also a loaf of banana-pecan bread for breakfast and snacking. I made enough roasted butternut squash purée to make a pot of stew and still have two cups left over for pancakes or muffins or bread. The stew is a vegetarian green chile stew: corn, black beans, and sweet potatoes with a butternut squash base and a quart of steamed summer squash that I found lurking underneath the corn in the freezer.

I also got the meal planning done. This is not as difficult these days as it once was. I no longer care what society thinks I should be cooking, though I did when my kids were little. I felt like it was some sort of abuse to not follow the set plan for a “traditional” Thanksgiving (or Yule, or Easter, or etc) with all the elaborations — parade, Peanuts video, hand-cut tags to record our gratitude, ironed tablecloths and napkins, etc. I can be forgiven for feeling that way, since there is a great deal of messaging barfed out of our culture specifically targeted to make me feel deeply inadequate if I don’t spend a great deal of effort — and money — on creating “the perfect holiday”… or else chaos will ensue.

Fortunately, I grew out of that. But I find that I still like making holidays. These are the days that revel in the ritual of a magical life. Holidays show us that life is holy and worthy of celebration. For a few hours we all gather together to honor the time at hand.

Except that we don’t do that very well, do we?

This is why I write. The best thing you can do for yourself, for your world and for the future is root yourself in place. And the easiest path to rooting is having a vibrant calendar, one filled with holidays and festivals and all the other reasons to gather together, to be together, to live together. Think of the ritual year as rooting compound on a life well lived. Unfortunately, there are few communities in the world that have a local wheel of the year. Global commerce has decimated more than local economies; it has destroyed local culture, replacing diversity with insipid, plastic, one-story-fits-all clones of EuroWestern modernity. Like everything about this culture, the calendar is context free.

This makes for ridiculous incongruities.

Like… Thanksgiving…

In my country, there is a holiday for gratitude. This is beautiful and necessary. But then a narrative of colonizers and indigenous folks got plastered onto this day. Also, since the mid-20th century, this holiday has been less a day of gathering to give thanks than it is open season for the gluttonous spending leading up to Christmas. And then there is a patina of nostalgia layered on to the colonial narratives and over-consumption. This is where the traditions are to be found. This being a synthetically manufactured, not organically grown, holiday, there are no actual traditions — the trappings of Thanksgiving come from messaging and image, both largely drawn from marketing.

This is a feast based on ahistorical elite fancies and the imperatives of the market. So tradition has us all sitting down to a meal centered on a large roasted bird. There are usually potatoes and green beans and some version of cranberry sauce. There is pumpkin pie for dessert. This is the Thanksgiving dinner. It is almost inconceivable to serve anything else on this Thursday in late November.

So I was meal planning for Thanksgiving. I was also fixing food for the rest of my workweek — a pot of corn, beans, squash and chile. And as I worked I began to wonder why the feast of gratitude should be so… uniform… regardless of place, regardless of people. Why do we eat turkey? And the thing about that question is just about everyone asks it. Few people even like turkey.

There is no evidence that pilgrims ever ate turkeys; however, there is ample evidence for turkey featuring in Native American diets. It is one of the only domesticated animals of the pre-conquest North American continent. So a feast of pilgrims and natives might have included turkey, though there is no specific mention of the bird in the long list of game Massasoit’s people brought to the feast. But the real reason we eat turkey is that it is a large bird that is more easily domesticated than the geese and swans that once graced the feasting board. It is a roasting bird that is marketable to the masses.

I don’t eat meat because I can’t digest most of it. But I can eat chicken, white fish, and turkey without too much gastronomical distress. So I often roast turkey for fancy meals. This year I decided to buy a free-range organic turkey from a local farm, because that seems the least destructive of feast choices. No soy farms around here… For the rest of the meal, I chose foods that were grown locally in ecologically intelligent fashion. There will be green beans with mushrooms and wild rice, sweet potatoes with ginger, and whatever bread I feel like baking on Thursday. I’ve already made the cranberry sauce. Most of these things are from Vermont, with special things like oranges and ginger root added in small amounts. This is a fairly traditional meal for New England because all these foods are found here in New England. But what of New Mexico?

In New Mexico, Thanksgiving dinner “should be” the same as it is here in New England — turkey, potatoes, pumpkin pie. But these are not New Mexican foods. People in New Mexico do eat potatoes, pumpkin and sometimes turkey, but they prefer carne adovada, blue corn enchiladas, posole and tamales. A thanksgiving feast in New Mexico needs chiles at a minimum. My pot of green chile stew is a far more traditional fancy meal for my culture. Why shouldn’t that be the Thanksgiving feast? In truth, when I cook for the autumn harvest festivals, this is exactly what I make. This is also what I grow in my garden. There is no valid reason that turkey should take precedence over the foods of my garden and culture. But I’m eating turkey…

Still, turkey is at least found in New Mexico. There are farmers who raise the birds and there are hunters who bring in wild turkey to the local carnicerias. Potatoes, however, are not local, even though New Mexicans eat them by the ton. To grow potatoes in the high desert, you need a cool canyon and many gallons of supplemental water each week. Thus potatoes are largely imported. This is not a traditional food. It seems rather artificial to include potatoes in a thanksgiving meal in New Mexico. But there they are on the Thanksgiving table nonetheless. Because potatoes are part of the imposed story, the food we’re supposed to eat, even if it’s impossible to produce it in our homeland.

Now, consider Hawaii. What of any of these foods makes any sort of sense on Hawaiian tables? Do you begin to see the problems here?

As I was cooking, I was listening to the holiday music that I like but that offends my sons. (Yes, I like Enya… I’m only moderately embarrassed by that…) I love Christmas music. People in my culture have been putting their best musical efforts into Christmas for centuries. I really love that you don’t listen to it at any other time of the year. It is special. Holy-day music. But for some reason, while I was cooking what I think should be my thanksgiving and planning what will be my Thanksgiving, I was struck with how unrooted these songs are.

Yes, of course, they are celebrating a savior son of a distant sky-god, promising an un-Earthed eternity to the chosen. Not exactly place-based. They are the songs of one rather small, rather atypical culture. Most of the songs with words are from a smaller subset of that culture. These are not ideas and stories that come from a place. They are not tied to anything sensible. They are rootless, perhaps even in the places where those stories are native, certainly in the wider world where those stories don’t make sense at all. And yet they are slathered all over the globe.

Does “White Christmas” make sense anywhere these days? Has it ever had meaning over most of the planet? If Christmas is supposed to be white and you’ve never even seen snow, do you get to have a Christmas?

Now, take “The Christmas Song” (apologies to Mel Tormé). I love this song. It is touching without being sappy. The music is eminently compelling — just try to not sing along with Nat King Cole. But it’s total bunk! Chestnuts were never “roasted on an open fire” since this song was composed. Chestnut trees were destroyed by the early 20th century. There were only a few left by mid-century. And mistletoe? You need it to “make the season bright”. Where do you get it? How do you get it? What is it??? Absorbing this message leads to crazy behavior like going and buying plastic greens and latex berries that are even more toxic than oak mistletoe, but far easier to obtain in December — as well as indestructible… those fake greens will still be poisoning your grandchildren’s grandchildren.

These things might seem inconsequential. Surely Thanksgiving is more than turkey. Christmas is more than plastic greenery, right? We all know the “real meaning” of these holidays…

Except… we don’t. Or we wouldn’t be buying fake greenery at all.

We know the symbols of the seasons, the ones fed to us through marketing and cultural occupation. We know the “traditions”. We know the songs. We don’t know what we can’t experience though. We don’t know the stories. We don’t know what it is to be living those traditions. We don’t know why those traditions came to be. We don’t know our place in those traditions. We can’t feel any of it. Most of it is so artificial it can’t be felt at all… by anyone…

None of it makes much sense.

Now, consider how these decontextualized holidays tend to remove context from the rest of our lives. These are the special times, the times we anticipate, celebrate, remember. These are the best times of our lives… and they mean… nothing. They have no ties to the real world around us. A white Christmas in Sydney is not a thing. And so on…

Stories told out of place, stories that differ from lived experience, stories that make no bodily sense build a life-time of gaslighting. You are supposed to want to eat turkey. You feel like you are grossly deficient if you don’t want to eat turkey. You feel like your whole region, your whole culture is existentially wrong if there isn’t turkey. We are crazy if we don’t eat turkey.

Is it any wonder we are all so insane?

So…

My project is to put place back into life-ways. I can’t tell you what that means for you. That is the point. You have to know your place and grow your own lives, loves, holidays. You make sense of your world through lived experience. Your wheel of the year won’t be like mine. But maybe the example I give will give you ideas, things you can adapt. Probably you’ll not need a Thanksgiving, but there will undoubtedly be at least one thanksgiving meal in your year. There will not be turkey, unless you live where there are turkeys. There will be music, but it might be good to craft your own lyrics. Similarly, there will be stories, but they will be from your own place. You might have a holy child born with the sun, but that infant might represent the wonder of new life on Earth, not salvation from this, our only, life.

We all need ritual, a round of celebration throughout the year, days to await, days to remember, special days, holy days. But we need a calendar of holidays that are tied to life as we live it. We don’t need disassociated things. We don’t need imposed traditions. We need to be rooted.

We need green chile stew for Thanksgiving.

Or no… that’s just me…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023