For once, don’t argue at Thanksgiving

Someone has canceled at the last minute; someone nobody invited shows up anyway. At least one child refuses to sit at the kiddie table; the teenagers refuse to put their phones down at whichever table; an uncle insists on watching the football game at the table; a cousin is loudly certain that someone has slipped gluten into the gluten-free stuffing. The table itself looks nothing like tables on Instagram.

Those are the base-level perennial problems with Thanksgiving. But in recent years, we’ve had particular reason to squabble over the holiday.

For four unforgiving years, from 2016 to 2020, the problem was breaking bread with your political nemeses. How do you handle your Trumploving father-in-law or the out-oftowners who show up in MAGA gear? In some other neck of the woods, aggrieved citizens despaired about their Occupy nephew storming in unshaven from his sophomore year at some college “back East.”

No sooner was Donald Trump voted out than we had a new thing — the threat of death — to antagonize the proceedings.

With the government urging Americans to stay home, the vaccinated squared off against the antivaxxers, with divided families worried about the full immunological spectrum of their extended entourage.

Also last year and just in time for its 400th anniversary — though one could hardly suggest the issue was new — some raised the pesky question of Thanksgiving’s celebration of genocide. Thanksgiving is, at root, a commemoration of conquest and subjugation. The United American Indians of New England observe it as a day of mourning. The Wampanoags have expressed regret for helping the Pilgrims out in the first place.

Maybe it all just makes you angry and resentful. What has happened to our cherished American tradition, you wonder? Must everything be problematic?

Nearly every holiday — with the possible exception of April Fools’ Day, but just you wait — has become some kind of political football.

The Republican right has been catastrophizing about an alleged war on Christmas for over a decade, though nobody has alerted the pharmacy chains whose aisles are already laden with red- and- green candy.

Meanwhile, one poorly chosen wig on Halloween, fraught with potential cultural offenses, can result in social disaster. Please, let it not be your kid who winds up the wrong kind of Disney character!

Ye olden holidays, they are achangin’. For the past two years, President Joe Biden has issued a proclamation naming the second Monday in October, also known as Columbus Day, Indigenous Peoples Day in order to “celebrate indigenous history and our new beginning together, honoring Native Americans for shaping the contours of this country since time immemorial.” The obvious question there is, what took so long?

So let’s consider the nominees for this year’s chief Thanksgiving gripe: We could make a big deal out of the turkey shortage, for example. Both bird and side dishes have gotten notably more expensive.

After a summer of exorbitant and overbooked flights that got canceled just as its passengers straggled out of security, travel this year looks to be particularly crowded and unpleasant.

And there’s always contagion to fall back upon. With COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and the flu all going around, a full-fledged gathering should provide ample opportunity to spread ill health.

But would it be a problem to suggest that maybe Thanksgiving not be a problem this year?

Boiled down to its essentials, Thanksgiving is a holiday about shared gratitude. We could just think about the “thanks” in Thanksgiving for a change. That gratitude may have originally been intended toward God and those Native Americans who helped the newly arrived colonists survive — and for whom atonement may have been more appropriate.

But even for us secular humanists, Thanksgiving offers a moment to appreciate whatever good this year wrought, even if by accident or chance.