THANKSGIVING PERSPECTIVES: DIFFERENT LOOKS AT AN AMERICAN HOLIDAY

As Thanksgiving approaches, then passes, we pause and focus our lenses on this uniquely American holiday. As we’ve said, the three of us, great friends though we are, are not all alike. We see things differently sometimes, as our individual perspectives on Thanksgiving so starkly demonstrate:

Woodson

I feel conflicted at Thanksgiving. I find joy and sadness uncomfortably co-existing within my spirit.

The First Thanksgiving

I remember celebrating Thanksgiving in grade school at Holly Springs Elementary.  My teacher, my mom, invariably led us in a traditional Thanksgiving carol that went something like: “The year 1620 the Pilgrims came over. They landed at Plymouth Rock, then built up their homes. At harvest time, they started our Thanksgiving Day.” My mother didn’t teach us the Pilgrims were European immigrants who had, through war, confiscated from the natives the land on which they celebrated. She didn’t tell us native resistance to European conquest persisted until 1898.

So, each season when I sit down to a wonderful Thanksgiving meal with family and friends, I can’t help but ask myself: How do my Native American brothers and sisters feel today?  The disenfranchisement of Native American voters in North Dakota this year reminded me of their unique struggle.

I am truly grateful to be an American, but what about them? While I have much for which to be thankful – a superb education, a wonderful wife, five great children, a hopeful future, and a guardian of my liberty in a free press – I can’t help but wonder how Native Americans feel. Do they feel as native South Africans felt under apartheid?  I wonder.

Rob

The Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving week, I sat in a church with my significant other and almost 600 others for the 20^th annual Faiths Together Thanksgiving  program near my home in The Woodlands, Texas. This celebration promotes religious acceptance and convenes the area’s faith traditions for an evening of music, inspirational messages, fellowship, and food. Some congregations refuse participation apparently out of a reluctance to join in services with certain other religious groups. Nevertheless, the program brings together  Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus. and many other faith groups in a learning experience about one another and a celebration of commonality, not an accentuation of difference.

As I sat there listening, for example, as a Muslim professor described the numerous references to Jesus in the Quran and watching the joyous faces in a choir made up of

members from seven or eight different congregations, I felt especially thankful for living in a country where such a thing can happen. Despite America’s imperfections, we get many things right, religious freedom being one of them. Increasing hatred based on religious bias notwithstanding, our First Amendment and its twin guarantees of freedom from the tyranny of a state sanctioned church and from government interference in worship, including the right not to worship at all, stands almost alone in the world in its protection of religious choice. Citizens of many countries could never attend a program like Tuesday’s. I give thanks such a thing can happen in my country.

Henry

In my childhood, Thanksgiving was an exceptionally joyful time for interacting with family and friends.  The fall colors,

wonderful aromas, the school and church plays, and visits with family members made my world a beautiful, safe place full of love and enjoyment. There was a continuing expression of thankfulness at home, school, and church.  Our church, in fact, distributed dinners to the needy, though I didn’t then understand the depth of poverty and want in our world.

As the years passed, Thanksgiving became more complex. Yes, we still enjoyed family and friends and I helped our church distribute meals to the needy. I got my kids involved by promising a great breakfast at a restaurant if they woke up early enough to help. The bribe worked.

                          

In the midst of this joy, a pervasive sadness attached itself to me, a sadness I haven’t shaken. As we give thanks for our bounty, I think of all the pain, hunger, loneliness, and hopelessness far too many people across the globe feel. So, I increase my giving and I volunteer more, searching for ways of helping, and I guess, quelling that sadness.

I’ve concluded sorrow may be the price we pay for refusing to express the kind of love that would help those in need. We have the resources and technical skill that would end hunger, but we don’t. Practical solutions are complex and we erect walls of indifference and apathy. Suppose, however, each of us found a way to make some difference each day. We might stumble upon a movement. 

How can I ask for Blessings

On the Universe

And not universal Blessing?

Though I cannot comprehend All

I can entertain the notion of All

And

Wish you well

While enhancing that solitary Blessing

With the constant universal march of Grace

Does absolution follow?

              

ROB AND HIS DAUGHTERS: AN OLD FAMILY TRADITION

We’ve written about parenting, describing the highs and lows of raising 13 children between us. Presently, Rob relates a long standing tradition in his family. 

The Method to Our Madness

On a recent warm summer night in the Kansas City suburbs, I sat hunched around the kitchen table of a hotel suite with my three daughters, poring over a scratch-off map of the United

States revealing the states and cities we’d visited as a quartet with the scrape of a quarter across the gold coating. It was opening night of our annual Daughter’s Weekend, two uninterrupted days devoted to father-daughter bonding. Our first activity was plotting the places we’d gone to in the 23 years we’ve carried on this tradition (ten states, 12 cities it turned out). Figuring out where we’d traveled let each of us reflect on the meaning of our yearly meetings to each other and to our family life.    

In the mid-90s, I pondered the reality of having three daughters from two marriages who lived in different places. A significant age gap separated them.  One was in college and the other two had just passed toddlerhood. I’d read plenty about the benefit to girls of developing strong relationships with their fathers – fewer teen pregnancies, less involvement with drugs, fewer entanglements in abusive intimate relationships. I wanted those things for my girls, though I knew no magic bullet existed. I could do everything right and things still might go to hell in a handbasket. 

What did I do? To make a long story short, I borrowed a practice from my wife’s family and made some adjustments. Ida and her three younger sisters occasionally headed off on jaunts they called “Sisters Weekend.” Husbands, boyfriends, and children weren’t invited. The Stewart sisters said these excursions helped them forge stronger bonds with each other. Could my daughters and I do something similar and get the same benefit? 

Being the way I am, I made up some rules:

• We’d alternate between weekends at home (Houston) and taking trips.

• This would be an annual event everyone could buy into and count on.

• We’d share responsibilities. At home, each person would have meal preparation, clean-up duty, or a planning job, depending on maturity. On trips, while I paid for virtually everything in the early years, once the daughters grew up and became gainfully employed, we split meals, lodging, and entertainment, roughly according to ability to pay.

• Trips would feature educational activities, not just entertainment, meaning museums and cultural centers as well as ball games and shows.

•   No wives or brothers allowed.

•  No work! I couldn’t draft briefs and motions and the girls had to finish their school work pre-trip.

I didn’t know if (a) the girls would buy into my idea or (b) if it would help in creating bonds between each of them and me or between them as sisters. When we started in 1996 at home in Houston, I hoped it would become a longstanding tradition, but I had no more than that – hope. 

Our Greatest Hits

Over the years we generally maintained that 1-1 ratio of home events to trips, though we make more trips now. We’ve seen some of America’s most intriguing cities,

2017 New Orleans-Left to Right: Murriel, Rob, Shaun, Kathryn

including New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, Denver, and Nashville. We’ve been to a remote lake resort (Wisconsin), taken college tours (Arkansas and North Carolina), visited museums (the Field Museum in Chicago, World War II in New Orleans, Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Negro League Baseball in Kansas City, Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas), and been entertained by comedians, dancers, and singers all over. We’ve eaten great meals (Emeril’s Delmonico in New Orleans, Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque in Kansas City), and scrounged for late night snacks. 

Did it Work?  You Bet it Did!

My daughters, Shaun, Murriel, and Kathryn and I don’t have perfect relationships, either father-daughter or sister-sister. We have disagreements, arguments, and spats with each other and occasionally about each other. We all have bones we could pick with each other. 

But nobody got into serious trouble and all three graduated from reputable colleges (Miami, Arkansas, Clemson/Cal-Berkeley). All have been gainfully employed during their adult lives. None depend on me or society. We’ve all chipped in to help each other from time to time, but no one requires more than the normal love and support good family members give each other. I’d call each a cherished friend and a loving daughter. 

Daughter’s Weekend doesn’t get credit for all that, of course. It is one weekend a year. The day-to-day work of their mothers, brothers, teachers, spiritual communities, and their own character played bigger roles in creating the good people my daughters have become.

I’ll always believe, though, another thing played a part -- the time I spent with them on those weekends, when they had my undivided attention and when nothing distracted them from feeling my love for them or theirs for me and for each other.

At the end of that Kansas City visit, as we piled into the car for the trip to the airport, Murriel asked, “Where are we going next year?”

“Atlanta, maybe?” Kathryn offered, scanning the rest of us.

“Fine with me,” I said, putting luggage into the trunk.

“Me too,” Shaun said. “Long live Daughters Weekend!”  

 

2016 Chicago - Left to Right:Rob, Shaun, Murriel,  Kathryn