Giving thanks

The quintessential American festival of Thanksgiving happened last week. People all across the land endured the company of family for one whole day, and fortified themselves with feasts of roast turkey and grain alcohol, so they could sally forth for a day of bargain hunting during the Thanksgiving Day sales. Indeed, eating turkey and shopping are the two activities most often associated with Thanksgiving, with being stuck in traffic coming in a close second — this is also the busiest travel holiday.

No one knows precisely how turkey ended up being the white meat of choice at Thanksgiving. One theory states that the early colonists on the continent celebrated a successful harvest alongside the Wampanoag Indians with a feast that included turkey.

It is clear what the former were being thankful for — they had just been saved from starvation, but the Wampanoag were soon left with little to celebrate, and no one to celebrate with since they were all dead.

Bald over respectable

Another theory claims that Benjamin Franklin had a soft corner for turkeys and that is the origin of the bird's favoured place at the festival table. It's true that Franklin considered the turkey to be a “respectable” bird, and even preferred it to the bald eagle as a symbol for the new republic.

Despite his support, the turkey was deemed to be lacking a certain machismo, and so the bald eagle took its place on the great seal of the US, leaving the turkey to occupy second place on the Thanksgiving dinner plate. I leave it to the amateur psychologists to mull over how the national character might have developed had the national symbol been a wise but humble old bird rather than the flamboyant hunting machine we have today.

Speaking of hunting, the other big tradition for Thanksgiving is bargain hunting at Walmart and the other huge retail stores. This year was no different. Bargain hunting has come to resemble actual hunting of big game in its planning and execution. Once the bloodlust for cheap Xboxes takes over, it's every man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost. The seasoned bargain-hunter cases out the joint weeks before the planned heist, with elaborate entry and exit routes and strategies, and come the big day, sallies forth armed with unshakeable resolve and a can of pepper spray.

Several retail stores moved their sale opening date forward this year, opening Thursday night instead of the traditional early Friday morning. This threw off the strategic planning of many a seasoned shopping pro, and several large crowds demonstrated against another instance of corporate greed run amok.

Some even bleated about how moving the sale date forward meant there wasn't enough time for the traditional feast with family, but the corporate response was a polite request to stuff it, and the move went ahead as planned.

Shooting spree

Even with all these distractions, this year's mayhem has surpassed all expectations, with several incidents of crowds of shoppers being pepper-sprayed by rivals, and at least one parking-lot shooting over a video game. In case you were curious, the game itself was a shooting game, the kind often referred to as a single-person shooter. I heard on the radio that the Indian government has decided to allow international retailers such as Walmart and IKEA into the lucrative Indian market. I'm not sure what the effects of this decision will be, but the smart reader will brush up on his martial arts and pepper spray skills before the next Diwali shopping rush.

The movement, which started off calling itself Occupy Wall Street, and now merely calls itself “The Occupation”, also celebrated the festival. The denizens of Occupy San Francisco celebrated with a feast, but in the politically correct tone of the city, they called it the Harvest Festival, not Thanksgiving. These are uncertain days for the occupation, clinging on by a thread under imminent threat of eviction, its message increasingly distorted and confused, and the patience of the authorities wearing thin. In recent days, the movement has been roiled by reports of internal divisions, violence and drug abuse.

But a generation of young people has also learned to come together and protest, to pay attention to politics, and to link arms and march into a police cordon. This bodes well for the future, and it is certainly something to be thankful for.

(The writer is a San Francisco-based techie.)

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