Thanksgiving in America has just concluded, and since most French people don’t really have any experience with the holiday, we asked Shane to talk to us about it. Shane is an American and has been our inhouse proofreader for the last 5 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Q: As I\u2019m sure you\u2019re aware, France doesn\u2019t celebrate any form of Thanksgiving. Can you give us a bit of a history lesson? What is Thanksgiving? Where does it originate?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanksgiving in America has historical ties dating back to the early 17th<\/sup> century. When I was in elementary (primary) school, American children were taught of the First Thanksgiving where pilgrims and a tribe of natives feasted together to celebrate the first bountiful harvest in the New World and seal a binding accord for the protection of the newly arrived immigrants from other tribes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even before this \u201cFirst Thanksgiving\u201d, however, the holiday itself was old hat. Certainly, pagan harvest festivals occurred throughout recorded history, in honour of Demeter or Dionysus, Ceres or Saturn. Thanksgiving specifically had strong ties to Christianity in England, but remained, in its essence, a celebration and a means of giving thanks for a successful harvest and thus the ability to sustain the long, dark winter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a bit more to this story. As America started as a union of separate and individual States with very little federal oversight, many of the States celebrated Thanksgiving at various dates throughout the harvest season. The story goes that one woman, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, had written to various members of congress for some 40 years. In the midst of the American Civil War, in 1863, President Lincoln finally proclaimed a national holiday alongside a proclamation that he hoped it would help to heal the nation. The reason it is the last Thursday in November even though harvest season is generally much earlier, is because it was set to coincide with \u201cEvacuation Day\u201d an American holiday I didn\u2019t even know existed. It celebrated the exodus of the British after the Revolutionary War. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: It seems like a harvest festival is not really attuned to the modern world. How has the holiday managed to last?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, let\u2019s just say it\u2019s hard to take away a paid holiday from overworked employees, especially when all you\u2019re expected to do is eat!<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, it is true that our relationship with food and annual harvests isn\u2019t the same as it was in the 1600s. I think this is based on 3 main points:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aside from a few urban gardens, cities would be an impossible problem if not for the farmers who struggle through long hours with intemperate weather, mass production, and living on a razor\u2019s edge in terms of profitability. And let\u2019s be honest, as gratifying as it is to pick your own tomatoes or zucchini, those urban gardens aren\u2019t meeting anyone\u2019s annual calorie intake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, in modern western civilization, a bad harvest isn\u2019t necessarily a death sentence. Where there may be flooding or drought in some regions in some years, we also have the ability to import food from other regions, to improve yield and to make our grains and vegetables more resilient to harsh whether through genetic engineering and cross pollination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s hard to expect a population to give thanks for a harvest few understand, when, for decades now, food, in any form, has been taken for granted. Whatever nature throws at us, we almost never have to question where we\u2019ll find out next meal or snack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: Before moving to France in 2011, what was Thanksgiving like for you and your family?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanksgiving officially launches the holiday season for us in the U.S.: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year\u2019s all within just a few short weeks. It carries with it a level of excitement knowing that the end of the year is only stone\u2019s throw away, plus, let\u2019s be honest, there is something great about a holiday where all you\u2019re expected to do is eat!<\/p>\n\n\n\n But in a lot of ways, Thanksgiving came to represent more of a marketing ploy for Christmas than a holiday in its own right. Every Thanksgiving for nearly a century now, the Macy\u2019s department store has sponsored a massive parade that runs through New York City and is broadcasted to televisions all across America. With Santa Claus and the biggest characters of the year floating along the streets like giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Men, the Macy\u2019s Thanksgiving Day Parade is as much a staple of the holiday as turkey and mashed potatoes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And obviously, no discussion of the holiday is complete without acknowledging Black Friday. The year\u2019s biggest sales event where mobs of human\u2019s used to descend on stores across the nation en masse for an extra big price drop on those latest electronic gadgets. All of this as part of a lead up to Christmas season. In fact, when I was a kid you could mark your calendar by the holiday and know when you fired up the radio the day after Thanksgiving, the 24\/7 Christmas music marathon would begin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, in short, a typical Thanksgiving celebration has little to do with the original meaning of the holiday. It remains an occasion to feast with family or friends, but even when I was a kid the television had taken pride of place in most households, whether to watch the annual Detroit Lions or Greenback Packers football games or the Macy\u2019s parade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: Now that you live in France, how do you keep the holiday alive in your family?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Since I left my home country back in 2011, I have maintained the habit of having a small Thanksgiving celebration the 4th<\/sup> Thursday of every November. Since it started as a harvest festival, a lot of Thanksgiving revolves around food. Green bean casseroles, turkey, ham, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin, pecan or apple pie\u2026 In France, however, there is no national holiday and thus no opportunity to while away hours cooking entirely too much food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We try to prepare a bit ahead of time so we aren\u2019t eating too late at night, whether that means steaming and cutting some potatoes or prepping the stuffing or deserts a few days earlier. This year, for example, the menu contained a turkey roast, stuffing, cheesy potatoes, green beans and a pecan pie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When it comes to Thanksgiving dinner, I try to find a balance between nostalgia and eating locally. Whether it\u2019s ordering a turkey from my local butcher\u2019s shop or vegetables from the local market, I do try to ensure that I help drive commerce in my town and support farmers in my region. But there are certain memories from my childhood that are inexorably tied to the food and Thanksgiving experience that I do want to pass down to my children as well, and that\u2019s something I feel strongly about, even if it does tie me into more global food markets, such as pecans which are often harvested in North America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But above and beyond the food, Thanksgiving has taken on much more of its original meaning in my household. It is an occasion to spend time as a family and share and pass on values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: You talked about passing on values. What values do you try to pass on to your children through the holiday?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I think it\u2019s threefold my takeaway for the holiday and what I try to pass on. One, we have a beautiful, bountiful planet. I appreciate being able to enjoy a mango from time to time, even though one would never grow naturally in the Pays de la Loire region, but I try to ensure the majority of my food is local, if not my region at least the country or one of our nearest neighbours, like Spain or Italy. That\u2019s to help local commerce but also, and especially, to cut down on overseas shipping, not because I\u2019m worried about some murky and vague threat of future impact on the climate, but because I think it\u2019s just unnecessary pollution. We have a beautiful planet that provides for us, and I want to keep it that way as long as possible with whatever small gestures I can make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second is the importance of family. Not everyone is lucky enough to have such a strong support group, but when we have that chance, we have to nurture it. Put down our phones and gadgets, turn off our screens, look each other in the face, and connect. I am a fan of tech and a bit of a geek, if I do say so myself! But whatever the next big thing in tech happens to be, I don\u2019t think that there is anything that can replace real human connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And finally, I try to impart on my children that we have enough in our lives for which to be thankful. And that it\u2019s worth taking the time and setting aside a specific occasion to think about those blessings, those things in our lives we too often take for granted, from health and happiness to togetherness and the people who enrich our lives, from a comfortable home to the things that fill it, and our souls, with warmth. That\u2019s Thanksgiving to me, and that\u2019s what I try to pass on to my kids!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thanksgiving in America has just concluded, and since most French people don’t really have any experience with the holiday, we asked Shane to talk to us about it. Shane is an American and has been our inhouse proofreader for the last 5 years. Q: As I\u2019m sure you\u2019re aware, France doesn\u2019t celebrate any form of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":70895,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[793],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-en"],"yoast_head":"\nOur Changing Relationship with Food<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
Thanksgiving in modern America<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Thanksgiving from Abroad<\/h2>\n\n\n\n