Like many other parts of life, the celebration of Thanksgiving is complex. There are many reasons to express our gratitude and having a national holiday that focuses on the act of giving thanks is a worthy tradition. As long as humans have existed, gathering for a shared meal has yielded important benefits for individuals and for society. Scientists report that eating triggers the brain’s endorphin system, which is a series of chemical reactions that enhances well-being and connection. Eating with others has a multiplier effect on the endorphin system. Eating the same thing at the same time increases trust and connection between individuals.

On the other hand, in human history there have been plenty of feasts that have also been ways of showing submission and control. Harvest feasts at which landowners have provided a large meal for workers have not led to equal distribution of resources. Even family meals can be times of friction and displays of power.

I grew up with stories of the thanksgiving feast of the Pilgrims and Puritans shared with their indigenous neighbors, which were probably not very accurate to the reality of the meal shared in the fall of the first year after the Mayflower landed. It is likely that much of the food was supplied by the natives whose generosity had enabled the survival of the Pilgrims who arrived woefully inadequately prepared for life in a new country. The mortality in the community during the first winter was high and people felt a sense of relief about simply surviving. The natives had experienced incredible mortality from the introduction of diseases for which they had no immunity by previous explorers and settlers form Europe. It may well be that the first thanksgiving meal created bonding around shared grief as much as around a shared sense of thanksgiving. I’ve eaten enough funeral dinners to know that sharing food can be an important part of living with grief and sharing grief creates important bonds between people.

Despite the way that a clerk at the grocery store was dressed yesterday, the images of Pilgrims dressed in black with top hats and buckles on their shoes is probably no more accurate than images of Indians wearing nothing but feathered headdresses and loincloths. I have friends who are enrolled members of Native American tribes who do not celebrate Thanksgiving because of its glorification of a false narrative and its amplification of colonialism.

Still, celebrating Thanksgiving has been an important and meaningful activity for me and the people in my life. After experiencing thanksgiving as important times of family gathering in my childhood, we learned new traditions when we moved to Chicago for graduate school. Our student budget did not afford a trip back to our Montana home and so we shared the celebration with other students who lived to far away to go home for the holiday. Many of those students came from places that did not observe American Thanksgiving and so we improvised our celebrations. A potluck dinner in a student apartment afforded an opportunity for feasting and connecting. At our second thanksgiving as students in Chicago, a classmate who grew up in a family that owned a restaurant taught me how to carve a turkey after Susan had cooked the bird for our shared meal. It is a skill that I’ve employed many times since.

Since we retired, we have had a new to us Thanksgiving tradition. Perhaps prompted by moving to a new place in the season of Covid while shifting our role in the community of the church by retirement and moving near to our son and his family who have a tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving at the home of his wife’s grandmother in California, we have had more muted celebrations in recent years. We still prepare a sizable meal. I will soon begin baking rolls from scratch and there is a turkey breast thawing in the refrigerator. Susan will make a pie and we’ll have sweet potatoes and stuffing and special salads. But we plan to sit down at the table with just the two of us, reveling in the memories of past thanksgiving celebrations and enjoying intimate time together.

Among the things for which I am grateful are the places where we have lived and the people with whom we’ve celebrated in the past. I was less than excited that our first call to serve as ministers was to congregations in rural North Dakota. I was a child of the mountains who had some biases about flatlands and the people who live there. We joked about the tallest thing on the North Dakota prairie being a farmer standing in a field. That joke didn’t even originate about North Dakota. It would be a more accurate description of the Muffler Man advertisement on the edge of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which is a giant sculpture of a man holding a muffler erected in the middle of a very flat field. Actually the North Dakota State Capitol is a 21-story Art Deco tower and the part of North Dakota where we lived had plenty of hills and valleys.

Living in a small town a few miles from the location of the last buffalo hunt of the near extinction of the gigantic herds of American bison that once roamed the plains in the millions and were hunted in part of destroy the livelihood and culture of plains tribes we experienced a complex pattern of relationships. In the small town we depended upon one another. We shared meals with those whose political beliefs were different than ours and we forged deep relationships with them that continue to this day. As rich as those relationships were and still are, we were aware of racism that remained in our community which had been part of the territory originally granted to the Great Sioux Nation in the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868 and illegally abrogated by the US congress 21 years later forcing Lakota people onto multiple small reservations. Life in an isolated small town is complex, but the demands of small-town living require people to deal with complex history and relations. I am deeply grateful that those experiences were part of our lives and shaped the people we have become.

There are many other meals that come to mind as we prepare our celebration today. The rich tapestry of memory is another source of deep gratitude. However you celebrate, may this day bring you gratitude for the places and people of your life and may you once again be reminded that you are part of a story that is much bigger than you.

Happy Thanksgiving!