live free, consume and die

Thanksgiving is upon us once more. When I came to this country, I had no concept of what this holiday was all about; even though I had learned, as much as one learns in a high school American History class, about  Pilgrims and Indians (we still called them Indians then) sharing the colony’s first successful harvest on American soil before the white man killed and/or displaced all the Native Americans.... I digress.

As I said, I grew up with the story about Pilgrims and Indians, but I had no idea what modern day Thanksgiving was all about.  I started learning as a college student from my friends and their families; for it was with them that I would spend this most American of holidays.  I remember piling up with friends into Lisa’s old Dodge Dart and heading for the Mountains of West Virginia where her dad was a Park Ranger.  We would spend the holiday having fun hiking and rafting, reading around the fire, and participating in that age old Thanksgiving activity: eating, like pigs, the great food that her mother cooked.  There were also the trips by Greyhound bus (remember buses?  those big vehicles that actually took more than one person from point A to point B) to Jen’s house in Arlington, where the holiday had a more urban feel. I did not grow up with a family around me, just two loving, if weird, parents who did not celebrate any of the holidays that marked the Brazilian calendar into which I was born; so it was with joy that I would go off to spend time with these families that were not mine, but that took me in as if I were theirs. In college, I learned to love Thanksgiving. 

I left college, and although I still love the holiday, it now exists in a very different context from the heady carefree days of yesteryear. Since then, I have learned about Black Friday and how Thanksgiving functions commercially. After all, who would we be, in these modern times, had we not transformed a nice abstract concept about sharing and family into a portal for a season of shopping. A season in which merchants make up most of their revenue for the year and find out whether they will end up in the black.  And I learned this the hard way, by innocently venturing out to buy something one such Friday, only to find out that one does not shop on the Friday after Thanksgiving; one actually takes one’s life in hand to fight throngs of insane consumers who wake up at dawn to wait for shops to open in order to have quick access to imagined bargains.

The pairing of good will and sharing with commercial profit has always felt a little incongruous to me; but it was two years ago that this perceived inconsistency of the season took one more bizarre turn.  It was then that, in their infinite wisdom, the legislators of the great State of South Carolina, to the bafflement of many and the ironic mirth of some, upped the ante on the insanity that is Black Friday and started calling it 2nd Amendment Tax Free Holiday.  In South Carolina, on the Friday and Saturday after the Thursday of Thanksgiving in which South Carolinians just spent a holiday eating, sharing, and watching football with their family and friends, they can now go out and buy guns together without having to pay taxes on them (-;  I can’t write this down without smiling...  Apparently boosting gun sales without adding any revenue to the state's coffers to pay for such things as, ohhh, let's say education, seems like a good idea to our legislators during this season of "love and good will" that extends from Thanksgiving to Christmas...

Yes, I still love Thanksgiving... proof positive of the persistence of memory...