Berkley Center

As a Washington state resident attending university in Washington, D.C., spending Thanksgiving apart from my family is nothing new. My freshman year I attended President DeGioia’s Thanksgiving dinner, and sophomore year I celebrated with my friend’s family in New Jersey. However, this was my first year I spent Thanksgiving without sleeping in until noon—in fact, going about my usual Thursday at Oxford, it was quite easy to forget that it was Thanksgiving at all. The first indications were The West Wing clips on Facebook by my American compatriots studying in the United Kingdom, followed, most aptly, by “British Friends Describe Thanksgiving” on YouTube. It was almost difficult to wrap my mind around this—I mean, I get that they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here, but don’t they at least know what it is? The answer is no, not really.

As the representative for visiting students on Mansfield College’s student government, I was responsible for organizing entertainment during the Thanksgiving dinner and the bake-off for charity that followed. Trying to advertise this event, I would tell all my British friends to come to the festivities, and the most common response was “What is Thanksgiving?” Stumped, my American friends and I laughed awkwardly before giving some explanation that involved Pilgrims and Native Americans in some fashion. Whether emphasis was given to the positive or the negative of the celebration’s origins varied, however, there was a commonly shared, deep-seated ambivalence that I never noticed while in the United States. One of my favorite lines from the clip referenced earlier is: “The President either, like, pardons the Turkey, or they ritually slaughter the Turkey… It’s one or the other—maybe it’s both?” As one of my fellow American students commented, “It’s kind of what the Pilgrims did to the Natives as well. First, the feast then the smallpox blankets. Happy Thanksgiving!” Setting the PC-ness of the statement aside, it captures the sentiment that I encountered among American students well.

Tasked with giving a speech on the history of Thanksgiving during the dinner I faced a dilemma: how do you talk about the history of an event that has been as mythologized and demythologized as Thanksgiving? On one hand, I must address the British students who have never even heard of Thanksgiving, and on the other, the American students who have such mixed feelings. Within the United States, I think we subconsciously operate under the consensus that, yes, the English settlers did awful things to the Natives, but we all know it, so we don’t necessarily have to discuss it. In the United Kingdom, where there is no such consensus, it forces us to think about what exactly Thanksgiving “is.” Is it the history? Is it the attitude of giving thanks? In the hyper-commercialized, consumer-driven society we live in, is it really possible to say that Thanksgiving is about giving thanks—rather than the food or football?

If anything, my experience in the United Kingdom has shown me that indeed Thanksgiving is about just that, “giving thanks.” In an environment detached from Thanksgiving’s founding myths, and away from all the Black Friday madness, my Thanksgiving became not about the day, not even about the turkey, but about the people I had met since coming to Mansfield. For the entertainment, I asked my truly talented American friend, Margaret, to sing “For Good” from Wicked. The lyrics beautifully capture what I believe my friends at Mansfield are to me: “You’ll be with me, Like a handprint on my heart. And whatever way our story ends, know that you have rewritten mine, by being my friend.” It may have been pure chance and luck that I ended up at this particular college in this particular time, but to be with all the people that I am is such a blessing. As Margaret sang this song to an enchanted audience, I really did feel my heart fill with such gratefulness as to be indescribable. It didn’t matter that I was in the United Kingdom—Thanksgiving was with me, in every moment I had something to be grateful for. Thanksgiving may be a quintessentially American holiday (my friend from Seattle studying abroad in Australia completely forgot about it until the last hour, he said), but as long as there is some forum to celebrate it, be it a dinner or a bake-off, it follows us wherever we are in the world.