Thanksgiving? That’s got to be the next hate crime ...
LOOKING forward to your Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, stuffing your face with roast turkey, cornbread and green bean casserole studded with marshmallows, then settling down to watch the New York Giants play the Washington Redskins?
Nope, didn’t think so. Me neither. Unless you are an expat from the U.S. there’s no reason for anyone in Britain to celebrate this exclusively American holiday. Thanksgiving is a non-denominational festival which falls on the fourth Thursday in November.
In the States, it’s a bigger deal than Christmas, a time for families of all faiths and none to get together and eat themselves into a stupor.
on the stroke of midnight, those who haven’t passed out from the sheer volume of food, or exploded like Monty Python’s Mr Creosote after one final wafer-thin slice of double chocolate brownie, can waddle down to their nearest shopping barn for the start of the Black Friday bargain- hunting season, the traditional pre-Christmas orgy of conspicuous consumption.
Black Friday is so-called because it is said to represent the day retailers start making serious profits after languishing in the red for most of the year.
Neither Thanksgiving nor Black Friday have any relevance in this country. Yet over the past three or four years, both have been foisted upon us with increasing ferocity. Stores and online retailers start ‘ special offers’ on Friday to kick-start Christmas spending. THIS has proved so successful that a couple of years ago a full-scale riot broke out at an Asda supermarket in North-West London as customers fought each other for cut-price televisions.
It was a re- enactment of the great Ikea riot a few miles round the North Circular road, when someone was stabbed in a dispute over a discounted sofa. This year police have started advising retailers to hire extra security staff to prevent sporadic outbreaks of violence among bargain-hunters. Makes you proud to be British. Yet until about five minutes ago, none of this madness existed. Like Halloween, another tacky American import which has hijacked Guy Fawkes Night, and about which I wrote recently, both Thanksgiving and Black Friday are now fixtures in our calendars.
Supermarkets tempt us with ‘traditional’ Thanksgiving treats. Colour supplements carry recipes for Thanksgiving dinners. The Sunday Times Magazine this weekend devoted several pages to telling readers how to prepare mouth-watering delights such as pumpkin pie, candied sweet potatoes and green chilli cornbread.
Why? Do the editors imagine that out there in Middle England, people are thinking to themselves: ‘I could murder a slice of green chilli cornbread’?
London’s Evening Standard, my alma mater, got in on the act with recipes for ‘The best vegan Thanksgiving’. You couldn’t make it up. Presumably this was for the benefit of its hipster readers who use their London Transport lobster cards to clamber on any passing culinary bandwagon.
Last week, for example, the Standard food pages featured ‘A menu to win over a millennial’, which included Moroccan spiced smoked goat, octopus tentacles, pumpkin with quinoa, lime with seaweed, coal-roasted carrots and something called sumac — which I always thought was a 25- stone Scottish sumo wrestler.
But with the hated Donald Trump in the White House, I can’t imagine any achingly on-trend Standard reader in Shoreditch sitting down to a supper celebrating the Great Satan — not even the vegan version.
So why bother trying to force this alien festival down our throats — literally? Apart from crass commercial opportunism, of course.
Some spivvy PR company even put out a press release claiming that ‘one in ten’ British households celebrates Thanksgiving.
No, they don’t. Think about it. The population is now north of 65 million, depending on how many illegals climbed out of the back of lorries yesterday. Would they really have us believe that in Britain, on Thursday, 6.5 million people will be sitting down to eat a Thanksgiving dinner? Don’t be absurd.
We don’t celebrate France’s Bastille Day, or Canada Day, or Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead). So why the hell should we adopt U.S. holidays?
Will we be expected in future to mark Independence Day or Columbus Day? Don’t bet against it.
All of this comes at a time when there is a concerted effort to downgrade our own traditional celebrations. The campaign to erase Christmas has been under way for years now, lest it offends minorities. WHAT baffles me, though, is why we are adopting alien traditions. We are constantly being told one of the worst sins anyone can commit in these ludicrously sensitive times is ‘cultural appropriation’.
Wearing a sombrero or Red Indian head-dress to a fancy dress party is considered racist. White men and women who sport dreadlocks or braid their hair into cornrows are said to be insulting blacks — though, curiously, it doesn’t apply the other way round to black women straightening their hair.
Thanksgiving was first celebrated in 1621, when the Pilgrim Fathers fleeing religious persecution at home invited a group of local Indians to join them for a turkey feast.
Surely anyone in Britain appropriating Thanksgiving is not only guilty of disrespecting Native Americans, they are also causing grave offence to vulnerable descendants of those Mayflower Pilgrims, whose ancestors suffered for their faith.
At this rate, it can only be a matter of time before celebrating Thanksgiving is classified as a ‘hate crime’. I don’t want to ban it, just ignore it. But if you are gullible enough to guzzle down a Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, as the Americans say, enjoy.
And have a happy Black Friday, y’all.