Time-sensitive commitments precluded me from submitting a timely post about Thanksgiving. Even after receiving the Wednesday night SMS blast to “not be like them, but to fast instead,” I was determined to perform my assigned tasks – on a full stomach – preparing for the first Thanksgiving meal hosted by my wife and I. More about that later. After reading James Croft’s Thanksgiving for Humanist post, as well as the excellent comments, the SoF meme now compels me to add my own Thanksgiving reflections.

My earliest orientation toward Thanksgiving had always been counter-cultural. With echoes of Malcolm X’s “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, it was the rock that landed on us” in mind during my undergraduate years, I used to decry the idea of Thanksgiving celebrated as a holy day. I still carry a healthy dose of cynicism about our culture whenever the day approaches, especially because the real story and underlying lesson are always relegated to the fringes or the dim background, like the Native Americans in this Thanksgiving Day picture.

Nonetheless, notions of holiday polemics would usually become diminished by categorial and possessive layering of Thanksgiving Day qualia (thanks Brad for the link to the Paul Griffith’s lecture) after a few bites into the turkey, ox-tails, sweet potato & pumpkin pies, or after few hugs and compliments from cousins, aunts, and uncles at the dinner table.

Upon accepting Islam, more rationalizations were added to an anti-Thanksgiving posture. According to the reasoning of the strand of Islam to which I was introduced, celebrating Thanksgiving meant imitating non-Muslim behavior contrary to true Islamic piety. For a few years my wife, children, and I would hear about the jokes, laughter, and family news on the following day when we went to get our share of the leftover oxtails and pie (you didn’t really think a self respecting Jamaican could turn down oxtails under any pretense did you?). Happily, we haven’t looked back since we decided to rejoin the family tradition that is Thanksgiving. What caught my attention from James Croft’s post were his challenges- both personal and as a Humanist – in creating meaning around Thanksgiving. Muslims in America are undergoing similar challenges, with even word of an increased demand for halal turkeys this year. With its unique particularities, some in the African-American Muslim community continue to seek imaginative ritual expression. The Harlem mosque that circulated the flyer from which this picture was copied, sought to engage the community members in a cultural alternative celebration which would include a lecture about “The Gullah Wars,” an open mike for spoken word and story-telling, and the sharing pot-luck halal food.

Until this year, we probably would have spent the hours before meal time assisting the work of Nurah Amatullah in the Bronx, NY’s Highbridge section. IMHO, Nurah represents the ideal mix of interfaith theory and practice. MWIRD was started after Nurah completed a chaplaincy degree at Hartford Seminary, and she and her staff manage to keep the doors open to the community needs with not nearly enough resources. Nurah also recently completed her Doctor of Ministry degree from the seminary. I never miss an opportunity to extol MWIRD’s virtues and important work and hope to continue recruiting physical and financial resources for this organization’s important work.

Paul Greene’s response to Croft’s post, in the “history in process and flux” matter-of-fact style that underlies his entries, is probably the primary reason for this blog entry. My wife and I hosted this year’s dinner because her mother, the family’s matriarch, and my personal patron St. Mom, passed away earlier this year, and dare I say, unexpectedly (if “sudden” death is emotionally ever anything else).  You see, Mom (St. Mom to you – thank you very much) used to host the annual Thanksgiving dinner ever since she single-handedly managed to bring the last her six children to the US from the UK in the early 1980s. Like Croft, that first year probably didn’t have a lot of meaning, other than another excuse for the hard working nurse to spend some quality time with her children. As the kids married and had children, new practices were added to the ritual. At St. Mom’s funerary celebration, many of her grandchildren’s recollections revolved around their time spent with her individually, either before or after the meal, in one way or another.

My wife, her sister, and another sister-in-law, the new “triune matriarchs in training,” now continue the family tradition. The first post-St. Mom dinner was a resounding success, our kids frequently complaining about our frequent and raucous outbursts. All but one of the older children made it home from college, and it was not lost on us that in a few years they, their significant others, and children, will become a part of the family ritual. I’ll end plagiarizing Paul’s as follows “…Thanksgiving has never been a ‘religious’ holiday for me, though the evolution of my own sense of gratitude is to thank the cosmos (and God) for the gift of my highly improbable life as a part of this planet.” I do so with with a history in formation, that will continue to weave itself between that of the Native Americans and Pilgrims, but never too far removed from a healthy serving of oxtails.