WE ARE ALL THURSDAY

I have always felt that there is nothing like a little distance to provide a better view of just about anything. This is certainly as true, I believe, of American holidays as it is of anything else.
We live, part of the time, far, far away from where we usually live the rest of the time. And now and again I find myself explaining one aspect or another of the more well known American holidays to those unfamiliar with the same.
Recently, as I was explaining a number of US holidays to a cabdriver, I came upon the hidden obvious, which is that Thanksgiving is the most American of our holidays. Christmas, despite the assumptions which abound here to the contrary, is not an American holiday, though I think Americans are probably among the best at taking it to a place that could safely be considered beyond excess.
The Fourth of July is indubitably American, yet its observance is all over the place, with some going out for barbecues and fireworks, others indulging in jambalaya, some running off to the beach while others head for baseball fields. Some parade, others watch parades and others wouldn't be caught within a mile of a parade.
But Thanksgiving, now here is a holiday which is essentially observed by everyone in the same way. Oh, sure, there are exceptions, but they are surely the fewest in number, and generally perpetrated by those who object on principle to doing what everyone else is doing. But aside from those Pre Decembrist Scrooges, we all spend the day in the kitchen, often with extended family or friends, peeling and boiling and baking, cousins reunited, children making a racket from one end of the house to the other, the house nearly bursting from the contained smells of cranberry bread and turkey and stuffing and all the other things that everyone makes in the overworked kitchens.
We sit down, ten or fifteen or twenty or twenty-five (Rachel says things get unwieldy if the numbers go much over twenty, so twenty-five is our usual person ceiling) at a table laden from one end to the other with dishes of such familiarity that there are simply no questions-- just requests, beginning always with "Would you please pass me..."
It's the busiest holiday, it's the holiday which brings the most people home from away, it's a true uniter, cutting across the divides between the red and the blue, the classes, the cultures, the philosophies and the religions. It helps to remind us of who we are, and what it means to be American, because it reminds of where we came from, which is away, and to be grateful for what we have and to remember what we owe.