For several years now, Thanksgiving dinner has been a source of controversy. An annual barrage of articles offers advice about surviving the ordeal of Thanksgiving dinner. Until last year I considered such articles to be complaints about the disconnect between the ideal and real. The turkey wasn’t hunted, it was factory-farmed. The crazy uncle wasn’t a beloved old man but a somewhat creepy and obnoxious boor. The family togetherness was faked by people who spoke ill of each other the rest of the year. More alcohol was consumed than the church ladies were ever going to know about. I considered these articles the collective voice of the teenagers objecting to church clothes. It would be one thing if it were enjoyable or if it represented reality, but it isn’t enjoyable and we should own up to the reality rather than pretending.
The main objection in these articles has tended to revolve around the political—how could one deal with relatives who actually supported Trump? It was as though differing views on Trump were not a political difference but a religious difference. These writers being asked to attend Thanksgiving with their yokel MAGA relatives back home seem to feel like observant Jews being expected to celebrate Christmas. They treat it as a moral, even spiritual imposition. But last year I concluded that the annual spate of articles objecting to Thanksgiving dinner were not really just about Trump and politics. They are really objections to the ideal, not the reality, of a traditional Thanksgiving. It is the mental picture these anti-Thanksgiving writers perceive and reject, not the particulars of any actual Thanksgiving dinner, theirs or anyone else’s. Trump just gave them a handy thing to put their finger on and give a name to their formless larger objections. I think they would probably have issues with the holiday regardless of who might be president. The ingredients of the national holiday are mostly bourgeoisie ingredients. They glorify and idealize bourgeoisie values. The annual opinion writers’ problem is not the dinner they’re actually going home to. The problem is the Rockwell-esque, archetypal picture the dinner aspires to be.
I used to think there was just a perennial complaint about Thanksgiving. Now I think there is really a counter-ideal to it. Thanksgiving has competition. I saw it embodied perfectly last year in a picture. Well, a tweet actually, that contained a picture and a caption. The photo struck me immediately and profoundly with the impression that I as looking at an archetype. The people and setting seemed to represent something larger and abstract, a whole culture captured in a snapshot. They embodied the fulfillment of a competing set of ideals and aspirations with a kind of holiday of their own, every bit as concrete as a family gathered around a golden turkey embodies Thanksgiving. Here was what those who don’t aspire to the mental picture of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner actually do aspire to. The sort of people who deal in “how to survive Thanksgiving at home” articles and conversations might look at this picture and think, “There! That’s it! That’s picture I’m shooting for. That’s the cultural life I want. That is the fullness of what my own attempts amount to a hopeful shadow of or variation on.” It could function as the Normal Rockwell painting of a holiday for people who don’t like Thanksgiving and probably can’t stand Norman Rockwell paintings. It takes all the ingredients of dissatisfaction with traditional Thanksgiving and puts them together into a cohesive, cultural expression of a different culture.
The now famous picture shows five youngish professionals, three women and two men, happily enjoying drinks and appetizers in a nice restaurant decorated for the holidays. The caption reads, “Merry Impeachmas from the WaPo team!” I want to stress that I know nothing about the people in the photo. They might all be traditional conservative Christians with lots of children at home for all I know. I’m not really even interested in them as individuals, I’m interested in how the picture itself struck me as something many people who don’t like Thanksgiving could see as aspirational, something that combines various social ingredients into a cohesive cultural expression. The Seinfeld sitcom gave us the joke holiday Festivus as an alternative to Christmas and Hannukah, with the crazy Kramer character embracing it as “A Festivus for the rest of us.” I think this Impeachmas photo could strike certain people the same way. We don’t want Thanksgiving. We want this instead. Considering the picture as an archetypal ideal, what are the key ingredients of the scene and how do they compare to Thanksgiving?
The religious element of this scene, such as it is, is one of playful irreverence. “Merry Impeachmas” as a joke greeting among progressives has been around for several years, ever since some congressman said in Trump’s first year in office that he would be impeached before Christmas. The WaPo team would not likely tweet out Merry Christmas even on Christmas, and one does not get the impression these people likely said grace before the picture was taken. But the faux holiday greeting unconsciously captures the spirit of this replacement celebration. In this picture, political significance has replaced religious significance, and the news of the day has replaced anything timeless. It would have to be WaPo or the NYT for full effect, the flagship newspapers of the only cities that could make plausible claim to be where the most important people live. The picture is of a fun holiday gathering cool people who are successful at important, insider-type work, and the greeting befits those who consider politics to be as close to holy as life in this world gets.
The kinship element of Thanksgiving has been completely replaced in this picture by the team of colleagues relaxing after a day of important, newsworthy work. There is no kids’ table in this picture, nor are there any sleepy old people. Certainly there are no gender roles. The sexes are interchangeable. The matriarch has been eradicated altogether. This is a breadwinners-only club. Importantly, the scene is set in a restaurant, not a home. In this scene the people don’t decorate, cook, or clean up. They’re going to pay to have those things done for them. Homemaking, like child-rearing, simply isn’t part of the aspirational vision. There is nothing domestic about the scene, not even a dog begging for scraps. The culture this holiday expresses has little if anything to do with hearth and home.
As absent as the hearth is the family tree. The multiple generations of Thanksgiving have been compressed by lopping off the ends. No ancestors or descendants here. The people in this scene are all roughly the same age, or at least of the same generation. They are not newbies, but they’re young enough to be ascending the career ladder, more at home among college students than among retirees. The picture expresses no filial piety toward some old man, or mandatory patience for some pouty preteen. It depicts no excited little girls wanting to hold the baby. There are no heirlooms on the table or old family recipes on the menu.
Casual, trendy and upscale in this picture replace the formal, traditional and “down home” flavor of Thanksgiving. The picture wouldn’t work if the restaurant were a common diner like Denny’s where anybody might hang out. Not a stuffy, formal place with a maître d in a tuxedo, either. It has to be someplace where cool people who are also important and have money to spend might go to celebrate.
The scene is of an interior. Nothing in it betrays anything geographical. The caption, of course, sort of gives it away that it must be near Washington D.C., but nothing in the picture itself gives it away. It could have been taken in Oshkosh, Wisconsin or Macon, Georgia for all the viewer knows. But no… no it couldn’t have. Literally, maybe it could have, but not according to the ideal. The archetype requires not only be a trendy restaurant but a trendy city surrounding it. Where Thanksgiving has an unmistakably rural flavor, the WaPo picture is distinctly urban. You can tell just by looking at it. If these people aren’t urban dwellers, they certainly wish they were. And not just any city, but a city (usually New York, but also D.C., San Francisco, or Seattle) where kids who dream of “getting out” dream of going. So, not Indianapolis or Cincinnati. Someplace hip.
Where Thanksgiving has a generally conservative flavor, Impeachmas is unapologetically progressive. The Washington Post tried to apologize for the appearance of partisan bias in the tweet by saying the caption expressed no opinion either way on the impeachment itself, it was just that impeachment was what was on the mind of these reporters unwinding after a long day of covering it during the holiday season. But nobody of any political persuasion believed that explanation. The archetype wouldn’t work if had been the impeachment of Bill Clinton they’d been working on. Progressivism might not be officially mandatory, but Impeachmas is as politically progressive as Thanksgiving is autumnal.
Obviously, there can be a time and a place for everything. One can celebrate with colleagues in one way and with relatives in another. There is no reason someone couldn’t love a traditional Thanksgiving and yet also love the idea expressed in the WaPo picture, too. They are in many ways opposites, sure. Thanksgiving is religious, familial, traditional, conservative and rural where the other is irreligious, political, collegial, trendy, and urban. Even if they are different as night and day, nobody has to hate the one to love the other. Both can be good in their own ways. But they have come to be rivals because they vie to represent the soul of America. How is America culturally expressed? Where Thanksgiving has the Pilgrims, Impeachmas has the 1619 Project. Both are aspirational, but they aspire to mutually-exclusive ideals with contrary tellings of the American story. The two paradigmatic holidays can coexist in America, but they can’t both be the quintessentially American thing. A culture combines various ingredients into one cohesive expression, and we increasingly have two separate cultures in America with less and less in common.
More and more people are losing touch with traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Families are smaller. There aren’t many homemakers left. Few young women aspire to me matriarchs. Fewer dads are willing to be serious for a moment and lead the family in saying grace or offer a genuine toast. People have been career-minded and mobile for a few generations now; fewer people have an ancestral hometown. Life is disconnected from the land and from rural pursuits. Feel-good stories about the history of America have largely been banished. The number of people who don’t bother with a traditional Thanksgiving at all, or who don’t make much of it, or only endure it is probably growing. And the number of people who could look at the photo in the WaPo tweet and see an archetype of what should replace Thanksgiving is probably growing. They all can’t be up-and-coming journalists covering presidential politics, but they can all see that picture as the ideal that their own efforts are a variation on. It embodies their cultural aspirations just as surely as someone cooking a turkey can see the perfect, archetypal Thanksgiving dinner in their mind.
To me, the test of the holiday is the place it gives to prayer. A cultural expression in which prayer is inappropriate or atypical expresses a hollow culture. The center of meaning is gone. Neither politics, nor youth, nor education, nor work, nor trendiness, nor fun can bear up under the weight of receiving reverence and prayer. Until the people who find Thanksgiving objectionable have a replacement that calls them to pause in reverent prayer, they haven’t found a lasting replacement. When they do, I think they will have found their way like pilgrims back to Thanksgiving.