It's American Thanksgiving today. Across the United States people gather with their families, stuff their faces with food, and try to avoid politics before passing out watching American football. Variations may apply.
But because I'm a history nerd and because you're here to get something besides Uncle Bub's latest QAnon conspiracy bullshit let's talk about American Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is rooted in festivals dating back to England in the 1500s with the reform church.
But most of you are probably more familiar with the nice Pilgram story of 1621 where a good harvest was celebrated with the Wampanoags after the previous year when the Wampanoags saved the Pilgrims by giving them food as part of a security alliance against the neighboring Narragansett tribe.
There were several other feast for giving thanks held in the 1600s for various reasons, including after the bloody victory of the Pequot War and called for by church and governmental leaders.
There are many reasons to look back at the historical roots of Thanksgiving and see a holiday with ties to the European take over of the North Ameican continent, for better or for worse.
But the Thanksgiving that Americans celebrate today is a holiday that honestly has very little in common with those early feast of pilgrims and colonists. It is rooted in the American Civil War.
Sarah Josepha Hale had been advocating for an official set national day of Thanksgiving for 40 years. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln saw the tradition as a way to declare and celebrate an American holiday at a time when he was looking for ways to unify a very divided country.
Thanksgiving with the Pilgrams has it's issues. But as a symbol of national unity in a nation that is all too often divided. We have been divided for centuries. We continue to be divided. Anyone who thinks our issues today are new has been living a life of privilege.
We give thanks for many things, but what we should be looking at now is the unity aspect. Abe Lincoln formally established this holiday in the mist of one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, a conflict that had many political issues. This is a political holiday, the seeds planted by a people who wanted to escape the power of kings, and nurtured in the bloody history of this country. It's roots firmly planted in the soil of the battlefields of civil wars and the rights of humanity.
We disagree on many things, but we have to stop letting smaller differences be exploited to divide us. We are being divided on nearly every issue imaginable, race, gender, wealth. We can't even agree on how we should protect our planet or even how to get healthcare to those who need it.
That doesn't benefit any of us. It doesn't solve anything. We are losing our unity. Something so fundamental to the continued success of our survival it's in the first word of the name of this country. United States of Ameica. That important that we have to be united.
There are big challenges facing us. We have to find unity to fix them, we have to do it together.
For today though think of what you are thankful for. I'm thankful for all the people I've met this year, for the steps I've taken to making some of my goals and dreams come true. Tomorrow though we have to get back to fixing the broken cracks, and we can't do that without finding a way to unify the broken pieces.
Stay hydrated, keep dreaming.