By Walt Garlington, an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland. His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.
The philosopher Josef Pieper once wrote some valuable words on true and false festivals/holy days:
. . . the creation of completely new festivals on the basis of a legislative act, feria ex senatus consulto, is a relatively unambiguous problem, although those closely involved may find it difficult to see through the illusion. . . . Nevertheless, the Biblical sentence remains inviolate: that the festival is a day “the Lord has made” (Ps. 117, 24). It remains true because while man can make the celebration, he cannot make what is to be celebrated, cannot make the festive occasion and the cause for celebrating. The happiness of being created, the existential goodness of things, the participation in the life of God, the overcoming of death – all these occasions of the great traditional festivals are pure gift. But because no on can confer a gift on himself, something that is entirely a human institution cannot be a real festival (In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, St. Augustine’s Press, South Bend, Ind., 1999, pgs. 61, 62).
The celebration of Thanksgiving Day in the fifty States has the features of one of Mr. Pieper’s phony festivals, an institution created by man for utilitarian purposes. We may find evidence of this in the history of Thanksgiving Day:
The long-standing practice of delivering political sermons on Thanksgiving Day, which made Thanksgiving both a revolutionary holiday and the occasion of Federalist era political contention, now made Thanksgiving the tool of free-soilers and abolitionists. Thanksgiving was, above all, a New England holiday, and New England was abolitionist territory; but the association was broader than this.
. . . Throughout the middle and western states, Thanksgiving was taken to heart by those same evangelical Protestant denominations that made abolition a religious cause. Antislavery and abolitionist positions were the political beliefs of a small group of citizens in colonial America and during the early years of the republic; but in the 1830s and 40s, antislavery sentiments became an article of faith for northern Protestants, causing denominations to split into northern and southern branches. Many ministers who preferred to deliver strictly spiritual sermons on the Sabbath felt impelled to speak out against the evils of slavery on Thanksgiving.
. . . Despite the strident tone of many Thanksgiving sermons, there were people of both North and South who felt that Thanksgiving Day could be a useful tool in the effort to preserve the Union in harmony and compromise. The hope, expressed by Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, was that a national holiday on which all Americans gathered to count their blessings would encourage a feeling of national unity and make all parties more willing to compromise.
This ‘holiday’ has only degenerated further over the years, to the point that neither the current president nor the president-elect bothered to mention God in their Thanksgiving Day statements this year. Here is a portion of Biden’s:
This Thanksgiving, as families, friends, and loved ones gather in gratitude, may we all celebrate the many blessings of our great Nation.
Thanksgiving is at the heart of America’s spirit of gratitude — of finding light in times of both joy and strife. The Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving to honor a successful harvest, made possible by the generosity and kindness of the Wampanoag people. On the way to Valley Forge, as General George Washington and his troops continued the fierce struggle for our Nation’s independence, they found a moment for Thanksgiving. And amid the fight to preserve our Union during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday, finding gratitude in the courage of the American people who sacrifice so much for our country.
And here is Trump’s not unusual loud-mouth declaration:
Happy Thanksgiving to all, including to the Radical Left Lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our Country, but who have miserably failed, and will always fail, because their ideas and policies are so hopelessly bad that the great people of our Nation just gave a landslide victory to those who want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Don’t worry, our Country will soon be respected, productive, fair, and strong, and you will be, more than ever before, proud to be an American!
Our sham Godless holidays reveal a terrible truth about ourselves, that we believe we are God, able to grant salvation to one and all:
. . . wherever in the course of history we encounter artificial holidays, we may conclude that they point to a particular interpretation of man’s being: to claim that man, especially in the exercise of political power, is able to bring about his own salvation as well as that of the world (Pieper, p. 62).
Because Thanksgiving Day did not originate in an act of God but an act of man, it is unsurprising that it has fallen to such a degrading level, both celebrating and celebrated with acts of debauchery: overeating and overspending and binge-watching various glowing screens.
Real holy days and their associated festivals have a different origin, a sacred origin, as Mr. Pieper said above. Another philosopher, Mircea Eliade, elaborated on that point in his own writings:
With each periodical festival, the participants find the same sacred time–the same that had been manifested in the festival of the previous year or in the festival of a century earlier; it is the time that was created and sanctified by the gods at the period of their gesta, of which the festival is precisely a reactualization. In other words the participants in the festival meet in it the first appearance of sacred time, as it appeared ab origine, in illo tempore. For the sacred time in which the festival runs its course did not exist before the divine gesta that the festival commemorates.
Such acts of God in the cosmos He made can only be properly celebrated in one particular way, in ritual worship:
There can be no festivity when man, imagining himself self-sufficient, refuses to recognize that Goodness of things which goes far beyond any conceivable utility; it is the Goodness of reality taken as a whole which validates all other particular goods and which man himself can never produce nor simply translate into social or individual “welfare.” He truly receives it only when he accepts it as pure gift. The only fitting way to respond to such gift is: by praise of God in ritual worship. In short, it is the withholding of public worship that makes festivity wither at the root (Pieper, p. 71).
There is the sad and awful truth for folks in the States: Thanksgiving Day, without a divine root and disconnected from the worship of God in the Divine Liturgy, is a silly non-entity without any definite shape that can be molded into whatever kind of celebration someone wants to make it. Whether in the North or in Dixie or etc., it is the result of man’s fiat, not God’s: ‘We ordain that this day . . .’ rather than ‘Thus saith the Lord.’
Some days of devotion that Western Christians, whether Orthodox or not, have contrived simply haven’t worked out like they were intended to. The moving of All Saints Day to November 1st by the Orthodox of England, Germany, and other countries, has led to a neopagan celebration instead (Hallowe’en), which we all know very well. It appears that Thanksgiving Day, established by the heterodox, is heading in this same direction. Instead of trying to breathe new Christian life into Thanksgiving Day (i.e., to put new wine into old wineskins), it might be better to scrap it entirely and begin anew. The OCA’s Metropolitan Tikhon, in his Thanksgiving Day encyclical for 2024, gives us a good idea of what direction to go. He writes in part:
The world around us believes—and always has believed—that happiness comes through power, through control, through wealth. The world teaches us that happiness is born of the ability to satisfy one’s own desires.
In the Church, however, we know a greater happiness, the happiness of thanksgiving. This does not mean giving thanks just for the things that we enjoy, the things that appeal to us, the things that satisfy our appetite and our self-conceit. Christian thanksgiving is the thanksgiving of St. John Chrysostom, who, dying in exile, unjustly persecuted, far from friends and homeland, departed this mortal life with the words: “Glory to God for all things!” Christian thanksgiving is the thanksgiving of St. Nikolai Velimirovic, who spoke of his time in Dachau concentration camp thus: “If it were possible, I would give the remainder of my life for one hour in Dachau.”
These are not expressions of masochism or stoic indifference, but rather expressions of thanksgiving born of true Christian experience, proceeding from a profound knowledge of man’s sinfulness and God’s infinite love. Because Christ, mounting the Cross, took on all the suffering caused by our sin in order to defeat sin and its ultimate consequence—death—suffering is forever transformed. When we suffer with thanksgiving, humility, and repentance, suffering relieves our sins and brings us near to God himself. More than this, suffering is the path beyond suffering, the path to life and resurrection.
Thanksgiving, the exclamation “Glory to God for all things,” has thus become a literal lifeline—this is how we cling to God amidst all the adverse circumstances of life. Then, even darkness becomes light, and bitterness becomes sweet, and the worst consequences of our sins become a pathway back to God. In this way, thanksgiving proves itself to be a power beyond any worldly power, a joy and nearness to God that is untouchable by any authority or means in this world.
Therefore, even as we give thanks for family, friends, for prosperity, for life’s simple joys—for God is the Giver of all these good things, too—let us also strive toward the truly Christian thanksgiving of the saints, the thanksgiving that recognizes all things as sent down from on high for the sake of our salvation.
The days of the Orthodox Church’s calendar that commemorate the great martyrs and other suffering saints, whether St John Chrysostom or St Thekla or some other, they who show us, like our Lord, precisely what a blessed life really is – those are the days on which we ought to consider holding our Thanksgiving Day celebrations, remembering and repeating those beautiful words of St John – ‘Glory to God for all things!’ – as we attend the Divine Liturgy and give thanks to the All-Holy Trinity for all of our sufferings, struggles, sorrows, and tears, and for all of our joy and laughter and comfort; as we receive Life itself from the Holy Chalice; as we sing the Akathist Hymn ‘Glory to God for All Things’ (words, CD); as we hymn the supremely blessed martyr-saints; as we mystically participate in the events of those holy days. A Thanksgiving Day set upon such a foundation would stand a much better chance of avoiding another fall into the pit of the shameful passions while drawing us closer to our Heavenly Father, from Whom comes every good and perfect gift (James 1:17).
