No, I have dinner with my family but I don’t “celebrate Thanksgiving.”

To name just one typical atrocity – Scalping is downright universal – it was not taught to Indians by whites nor vice versa. Herodotus mentions it, finds on the American continent show evidence of scalping from pre-Columbian times etc. People excel in cruelty regardless of time, location or ethnicity. Humans just tend to think in either-or terms, as evidenced by the “savage Indian” and the contemporary “noble Indian” images.

I think that, if you read it, you will change your mind about the benign character of British imperialism. It might even help you to have a clearer picture of where jihadism comes from in South Asia.

The book amply demonstrates the willingness of the functionaries of the Raj to commit genocide in 1857, and to behave not a whit better to the Indians than the Spaniards or the Anglos behaved toward the Native Americans.

What sort of national holidays would you like to see? Personally, I’d like to see more of an adoption of the Catholic calendar into statue. But since we live in a society that is dedicated to religious pluralism, I’m not sure that is practical.

I have long considered Thanksgiving an opportunity to observe a feast in common with my neighbors of differing faiths. I see it as an opportunity to celebrate my solidarity with my neighbors with whom I do not share communion. That this solidarity is connected with at least some expression of thanks to a higher power is something I’ve always seen as a benefit of the Thanksgiving holiday. Of all of the civic holidays, with the exception of Chirstmas which is a special case, it seems to be the one with the most room for the active participation of religious person in the secular liturgy of the state.

So, what secular holidays do you think would be good to celebrate with our non-catholic and non-christian neighbors? Is there a menas of incorporating the kinds of celebrations you might have in mind into the current civic calendar?

If you truly want to subvert or resist the secular version of Thanksgiving make it authentically Catholic. Encourage your extended family to attend mass with you on Thanksgiving morning which is as you rightly point out, the true Thanksgiving. Turn off football after dinner and pray the rosary with your extended family. Read a section of the bible before dinner such as the gospel of the lepers or psalm 100 before dinner. That truly wold be a subversion of the American secular version of Thanksgiving.

And if you really want to take on American culture and idol worship, Super Bowl Sunday is the ultimate disgusting American idol worhsip.

Our holidays range from pernicious, like Flag Day, to truly worthy, like Thanksgiving. Giving thanks is never redundant. My Jewish next door neighbors, and my younger brother who is not quite sure if he even accepts the existence of God anymore, can not join me in the Eucharist but they do join us at Thanksgiving. I suspect Jesus would not call this strengthening of our love-ties idolatrous.

And the paragraph about how eating turkey is equivalent to animal sacrifice is a huge reach. At a big gathering you serve food. People like to eat and most holidays have traditional foods associated with them. Is my Romanian grandmother being mean to pigs when she serves Christmas ham? Am I celebrating a faux sacrament on St. Pat’s with my corned beef munching?

This is the kind of stuff people are referring to when they talk about theology as self-indulgent or cut off from lived Christianity. The idea that it would be good for Christians to “resist or subvert” Thanksgiving is one that could only be born in the mind of an academic. It just makes zero pastoral sense and an evangelist or pastor would never come up with it.

Pastorally, we should be working to strengthen up the spirit behind Thanksgiving and using it to build momentum for solidarity. It’s just not true that the day is only celebrated by white, middle, and upper class Americans. In my town there is a resturaunt that opened to doors and served meals ALL DAY to anyone who walked in, no questions asked! This is not a soup kitchen or a charity, but a business! It is only one day, but it is something, and why shouldn’t we rejoice and give thanks for love?

I think if you ask the poor and oppressed of all faith traditions you will find that they do not consider denunciation of cultural holidays a source of joy. Believe it or not the poor like to celebrate with their neighbors. I do not know if I qualify as poor although in recent times my family has had issues affording food. We did however have the complete spread including the slaughtered turkey. Last year our parish hunger ministry provided us the bird, this year we bought our own. One whole day for love and thanking God, and it is a national holiday! I wish we had four Thanksgivings a year instead of one, it would do us good.

I meant to assert that colonization does not produce consistently bad results along the line of, say socialism, which has been uniformly disastrous for those cursed to live under that system of governance.

I am always amused that many scholars shrink from colonization like a vampire to holy water, yet compliment socialism as having good intentions. Of course colonization had many aspects that were repugnant, but certain colonizers actually ruled in a more benevolent manner than others. I would rather be colonized by the British at almost any time in their long imperial past than join the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere at any time. The Roman Empire actually did leave the provinces with the foundation of civilization as we still understand it.

Both of us view history with an exceedingly jaundiced eye. Having dealt with the media and historians for the past thirty years, I realize how deeply compelled most of them are by their personal ideological biases rather than a quest for the truth. It is the rare person indeed who can embrace an idea that contradicts their governing ideology.

And a sad, but true, fact that most people argue only to state their own case, and not truly seek to understand as much as be understood.

The truth of American history was most certainly distorted during the 1950s and before, but the embrace of useful idiots like Howard Zinn and his ilk, is swinging the pendulum too far.

The children I taught were mostly Navajo and Hope. They were the more or less “peaceful” Indians who stole from the Apache and the white men–both Spaniards and “gringos”–and who were mostly walked to death in the so-called “Long March.”

Those Natives don’t particularly like being lumped in with all the others in the White Man’s history of their peoples. They also don’t like Thanksgiving, and they DO see it as a rather triumphalist celebration of the genocide of their peoples.

To me, Thanksgiving is nothing but the first of a series of orgiastic celebrations of American consumerism, culminating with the insane debauchery of Christmas, and I’m perfectly happy to be away from it.

Interestingly enough, the Wampanoag sought out the English for an alliance to protect their faltering tribe from other tribes that sought to destroy them.

Whether or not the “mythical” thanksgiving day occurred, the alliance and the interaction is a matter of historical record.