Thanksgiving - WHY AND WHY NOT by Nelson A. Navarro

Down to the wire yesterday, a good friend and I were frantically putting together what would somehow pass for Thanksgiving dinner.

"We have to celebrate," said this earnest Makati businessman. "My wife has volunteered to do the turkey and trimmings and you guys may bring the pumpkin pie and cranberry juice."
My first impulse was to burst out laughing. The mere idea seemed preposterous in this tropical heat and in a country teetering on the edge of political chaos and economic ruin. Also, I hate turkey. I never liked that yucky stuff that tastes like paper even when I was still a raving carnivore.

But before I could shoot down the idea, my friend followed with this rather disarming line: "Only us who have lived in America and enjoyed being there can understand what Thanksgiving is all about. We don’t have to feel so colonial and so defensive. It’s a personal matter and a damned good one."

As we made calls to fill up the six or eight places on our dinner table, it occurred to me that, indeed, Thanksgiving ought to be a moveable feast – one you take with you all your life, the way Hemingway defiantly celebrated the Paris of his young bohemian years.

Like opera, bagel and The New York Times, Thanksgiving dinner came late into my life, when I was in my twenties, alone but not lonely in exile in New York. My family had made it a point to celebrate the event when I was growing up in Bukidnon, but that was a bit trying-hard and all for show.

I couldn’t have gotten a better introduction than the one I got exactly 26 years ago. I was taking graduate work at Columbia and staying at the International House along Riverside Drive. As soon as November set in, everybody seemed to be making plans to go away for Thanksgiving. The place, we were warned, was going to become the equivalent of a ghost town.

Fortunately, the management had the good sense to arrange a Thankgiving program for total strangers. I was one of 15 foreign students who signed up for a four-day weekend with different American families.

The extra treat was that we were headed for Cape Code, where the Puritan Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving ceremony in late 1620, after making their perilous journey from England.

Andrei, a Greek boy, and I were assigned to Chatham, a quaint town close to Hyannisport, summer home of the Kennedys. Our host parents were Massachusett liberals who firmly opposed the Vietnam War. The father was a journalist who, of course, splashed Andrei and me, complete with flattering photos in the local paper. His wife wrote lush romance novels from her kitchen. They had two sons who were home from college and were roughly the age of Andrei and me.

The six of us bonded instantly and well. Andrei had a slight problem with English, but his was a charming balance to my US-style loquacity. First, we were taken on a lazy tour of Cape Cod. We drove north towards Wellfleet to see Corn Hill where the Puritans found and stole corn hidden by the Indians and meant to feed their tribe through the long winter.

Apparently, the Puritans, all of 103 of them who survived the harrowing sea voyage, were famished and near-death when they came upon this very same cold and unpromising landscape, never more like Siberia than in November. Finding corn, along with cranberry and pumpkin, amounted to a miracle. Most valuable was the turkey, native to America and easy to catch.

Turkey has always been a ugly, dumb and tasteless bird. But to the desperate Puritans, it was nothing short of manna from heaven. Unlike other birds which fly south to avoid the frost, it’s too big and clumsy to fly high or fast enough to escape the hunters of winter.

And so turkey became the centerpiece of that first Thanksgiving and thereafter. For a long time, it was strictly November fare until the turkey industry began promoting it as a substitute to chicken.

Our next stop was Plymouth. On the sea side, there was a replica of the Mayflower, so tiny it looked just a tad bigger than our kumpit and hardly able to carry more than 100 souls for two months in uncharted waters. Nearby was Plymouth Rock, looking so small and insignificant, I couldn’t associate it with the American expression, "A Piece of the Rock," meaning a solid chunk of terra firma or territory.

More chastening was the restored Plymouth Plantation, a palisaded village. The Puritans were bigots and cheerless folks. They took faith and freedom so seriously that they had exquisite punishment for sin. They seemed to me the equally grim Protestant version of the Spanish Inquisition.

Whatever disturbing impressions I picked up from history were mitigated as my extended family sat down to feast upon the traditional dinner we had planned and cooked together. "Lord and Heavenly Father," intoned the head of the family, "we humbly give thanks for the great bounties of the land and the precious gift of freedom that make life truly blessed and meaningful. May we be forever worthy of the love and friendship of our fellowmen and women and of your most infinite mercy, Amen."

In any country or any language, this was one moment of human caring and togetherness that I could never forget and would always wish to come flooding back into my heart every time November comes along. And I don’t mind being called colonial.

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Nelson A. Navarro’s e-mail address: [email protected]