Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving …
-- Psalm 147: 7
I don’t often have fast food but on a whim I recently popped into an A&W near my campus. Waiting for my order, I noticed a wall decoration with the familiar company logo. Beneath the large letters, were the names Allen & Wright. There’s a phenomenon that was popular on social media recently that begins a discovery of something obvious with the phrase: “I was today year’s old when I discovered…” that A & W stood for the names of its founders.
Other “discoveries” people have made late in life include realizing the division sign (÷) is just a fraction sign with both the denominator and the numerator left blank. Or that a turtle isn’t inside its shell — it actually is its shell. As a specialist in the gothic, I was stunned to discover Grant Wood’s famous American Gothic painting Wood features a father and daughter, not a husband and wife. The story may be even more complex. Rumour has it the model, embarrassed at being mistaken for the wife of a man twice her age, went overboard reassuring everyone it was a father and daughter. The painter never corrected her nor confirmed her version.
Other discoveries: There’s a bear in the mountain face of a Toblerone chocolate bar. The hole in a pasta serving spoon represents the recommended single serving size. The word “footage” comes from film being measured in feet. The first episode of a television show is a “pilot” because it’s the first time it’s “on air.” You say “break a leg” to an auditioning actor in hope they end up in a cast. Hold your horses is a pun telling you to be stable. We are surrounded by things that are as plain as the nose on our faces but we never see, or perversely misapprehend, them.
I was easily in my late teens before I realized Canadian and American Thanksgiving are on different dates. Researching the origins of the event, I was stunned to read Martin Frobisher first celebrated Thanksgiving in 1578 on Baffin Island. It was not a celebration of a successful harvest, but sheer relief for successfully crossing the Atlantic into what would become Canada. Thanksgiving is also more popularly understood as the celebration of American Pilgrims in 1621, which has often been presented as a romanticized celebration of community between Indigenous people and settlers.
Thanksgiving isn’t a holy day of obligation but was always a part of parish life. Then I moved to Australia and a bunch of holidays shifted. Father’s Day was in September not June. Christmas was celebrated in July, a tradition that arose so Aussies could have a hot roast dinner in the cooler winter months. Most surprisingly, Thanksgiving wasn’t really observed. I remember my bemusement as the Australian news service tried making sense of an American tradition: the presidential pardoning of a turkey.
And I was today year’s old when I learned that there were reams of documents debating the validity of a papal indult granting permission to eat meat. I had always thought that an indult — or a permission to do something Church law normally prohibits — had been given by Pope Pius XII in 1958 that allowed American Catholics to eat leftover turkey on the Friday after Thanksgiving. It turns out this is disputed. Some say it was actually Pope John Paul XXIII who issued the decree, others that the indult was permanent, not temporary. Still others insist it is all a myth and no such order was ever given by anyone. To be safe, I have generally observed the no-meat rule.
I say generally because, looking back at my time in Australia, I recall bemoaning the absence of Thanksgiving and turkey to my parish priest who had spent years in North America. He nodded kindly and said, “Everyone’s got it wrong any way.” His punchline? “Every day is Thanksgiving. That’s what the Eucharist is for. It’s the Greek word for thanksgiving. There is, after all, no greater meal.”
As we walked together toward the church I asked, “So can we have a turkey meal anyway?” He looked at me with something not far from pity. “Not today you can’t. It’s no-meat Friday, and No Thanksgiving Australia!”