Pass the cranberry sauce

What a mad flurry it has been. This time last week, Thanksgiving Dinner was being prepared by many families with cultural connection to, or appropriation of, an event most popularly celebrated in the United States of America. Although there is disagreement as to exactly how the tradition commenced and when it should be celebrated, views on its meaning and value seem more aligned – gratitude, family, thanks for harvest and blessings. Its importance to the contemporary nation is enshrined as a public holiday.

Sixteenth century European refugees found their new land on the northeast of the American continent harsh and difficult, their survival uncertain; in contrast, the more temperate southern areas were already hotly contested colonial grounds whose prospects of survival were much more secure.

In what is contemporary Massachusetts, those who had fled religious persecution in Europe were able, with some help from local indigenous peoples, to grow sustainable food and, in doing so, secured their fledgling settlements. They repeated a tradition they brought from England, both its pagan and Christian versions - giving thanks to one’s deity for a successful harvest. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all had variations on this theme, too, and the nascent people of Israel were commanded to celebrate the “firstfruits of all your work in the field” (Exodus 32:16, The Message).

Thanksgiving Day celebrations, whatever their history and context, are like a “thin place” which connects this world and a transcendent one, a place where gratitude for one of life’s enduring mysteries exists. Vegetables, herbs, fruits, nuts – in short, food that nourishes us – regenerates and provides for us year after year after year. Agriculture is an enhancement of these processes, for sure, but there is profundity in a crop of tomatoes which emerges from one germinated seed, or arching raspberry stalks heavy with fruit sprung forth from seemingly barren lifeless winter brambles.

Then…thud. Thanksgiving Day collapses into Black Friday. Maybe you bagged yourself a bargain either in store or, more likely, online. Maybe you groaned with the dawning awareness that Christmas shopping season is unrelentingly upon us. Or maybe you used Black Friday as an opportunity to buy more modestly priced end of year gifts for colleagues, reminding yourself that the academic year’s close is imminent for some, arriving soon for others, and still a few weeks off for most – good for you!

As a counterpoint to Thanksgiving Day, though, Black Friday feels distressing, an abrupt bursting of the “thin place” of last night’s dinner. Why, after a lofty and uplifting occasion, are we confronted with crass commercialism? It’s reminiscent of Hamlet’s distaste for his mother’s hasty marriage soon after the death of his father, the King: “The funeral baked meats/Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables”, he laments (Act I, scene 2).

And given its cultural genesis is also the US, why has this newish opportunity to part with my money afflicted us? It feels like another malicious scheme designed to empty my pockets and feed the consumerist beast that has made its home amongst us. Is it some zeitgeist moment I missed while half asleep?

Apparently, it was not okay for retailers to start the Christmas shopping season before Thanksgiving Day, so Black Friday became the default start line. Cyber Monday has more recently been added, for reasons obvious to our commercially digital age. The deluge in my Gmail inbox testifies to the cultural dominance these two days have assumed in a country with no direct cultural lineage to Thanksgiving Day. A few people I casually surveyed (although not methodologically robust) didn’t even know there was a connection. To be honest, neither did I, until starting to reflect upon why it is I can’t seem to escape wall-to-wall advertising.

Then it hit. If Thanksgiving Day is so, day I say, sacrosanct that shopping for Christmas must wait until it’s over, what does it mean if we capitulate to the commercial and resist the transcendent? Cue one of Christendom’s significant days, which falls between Black Friday and Cyber Monday – the fourth Sunday before Christmas is the start of the season of Advent, a period of reflection, of anticipation, of hope.

For Christians of all traditions, Christmas is the festival that celebrates another remarkable “thin place”, a time when transcendence becomes immanent, knowable, present. It took the early Christians three centuries to fully describe what they thought this event meant (so let’s not jump to anachronistic conclusions), so 2025 will be the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea where the belief, or creed, of Jesus being both God and human was fully articulated. They finally ascribed a special meaning to an event long in the past, nearly as far separated in history as we are from those New England pilgrims.

For now, though, let’s return to the baby Jesus of Christmas. That’s cute, fun, celebratory, or at least that’s what tinselled trees and snowy dioramas suggest (again, what is it with the cultural appropriation?). But the immanence of the transcendent is what gets lost in the de-contextualised commercialism that the season has become. Like the dominance of Black Friday over Thanksgiving Day, the commercial focus can overshadow the origin story.

This reflection emerged while walking recently through Martin Place, in the centre of Sydney. The tree (above) must be in the order of 25 metres tall, given the size of the people standing near it. On one side of the tree is a Giorgio Armani outlet, the other is the Fullerton Hotel whose rooms range between $565 and $3075 for Christmas Eve – no room at this inn for me this year at these prices! A short stroll away is Paspaley Jewelers and M. J. Bale Men’s outfitters whose Cyber Week (is that now a thing?) sale will still set me back $649 for a casual jacket.

These are strange juxtapositions. Thanksgiving Day/Advent and Black Friday/Cyber Monday, a public Christmas tree (whose Christian origins are contemporary with our New England pilgrims, although the tradition started in Germany) and high street fashion and opulence.

And then NAPLAN results were released yesterday…but I digress.

It has indeed been a mad flurry.