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‘WHAT has Thanksgiving got to do with us?’ I can imagine many harrumphing. Certainly, no Puritan forefather of mine ever celebrated their remarkable survival of a transatlantic voyage or first year in New England by talking turkey.

But only last week, I got my husband to delay seeking a replacement television until Black Friday. For the non-versed, this is the Friday after Thanksgiving when dizzying discounts are offered to lure shoppers.

It seems a funny old thing that 401 years after a bunch of blow-hard religious fanatics sailed from Plymouth on a promise that they could be as puritanical as they liked in America, their descendants are exporting consumerist free-for-alls to the old country and beyond.

But that isn’t the only Thanksgiving paradox. In modern American fiction, it is often characterised as a holiday that brings families together physically, only to tear them apart emotionally. The Ice Storm by Rick Moody is set over a Thanksgiving weekend in suburban Connecticut in 1973. Its story moves between the adults and children of two dangerously entwined and comfortably off families, the Hoods and the Williamses. As bad weather moves in, the parents hit the booze — hard.

You might go some distance to avoid that kind of gathering. But lost in space, botanist Mark Watney, the narrator of Andy Weir’s The Martian, is sad to think of his family spending Thanksgiving in Chicago without him. ‘My guess is it won’t be much fun, what with me having died ten days ago. Hell, they probably just got done with my funeral.’

In No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, a woman who has achieved fame as an online wit is yanked from the virtual world back into the all-too-cruel real one by devastating news about her sister’s unborn baby. At Thanksgiving, she flies to her sister’s home to make her family dinner. ‘She would create a holiday atmosphere or die trying! Finally, as the sun was setting, they all sat down... and they thought of something called abundance.’

Whether celebrating Thanksgiving or not, I hope you experience abundance this season.