It is the start of Thanksgiving Week. What does it mean in the year 2025, a year of so much national turmoil? What did it ever mean?

The first Thanksgiving, surrounded in myth and undoubtedly distorted, was premised on a feast hosted by a group of illegal immigrants, arriving from foreign shores, speaking a different language, and bringing with them a culture totally at odds with the natives whose home they were invading. The year was 1621, there had been some accommodation made between the two groups, and there may, or may not, have been a feast with meat, fish, fowl, and all the trimmings. And while the invaders, a/k/a the Pilgrims, might have been giving thanks their God for their safety (and their turkey), you can be certain that the minds of the natives were directed elsewhere.

While Thanksgiving-type ceremonies continued on behalf of the growing number of European immigrants and refugees, it quickly ceased being celebrated by the natives, who were quickly at war with most of the newcomers, and who were outclassed both in weaponry and amorality by their White neighbors.

In 1789, first President George Washington issued a Thanksgiving proclamation which actually made great sense for the times. It was thanks for a new country, a new and unique government, with great hope for the future. Again, the thanks were given to God. And why not? And again it was Thanksgiving by Whites. After all, Blacks had recently been counted each as 3/5 of a White, and indigenous Americans, well on their way to removal or extinction, so it appeared, hardly were counted at all.

Apparently, the real start to an annual Thanksgiving holiday came in 1863 at the behest of President Abraham Lincoln. I don’t know what others think, but I find his Thanksgiving proclamation to be bizarre. After all, what was there to be thankful about?

Let’s see. Even though we are killing each other unmercifully in a Civil War, we are not fighting with any foreign nations. Thankfully, our industry is supplying us with enough war making materiel. And we have farms supplying us with enough food even as our armies are destroying farms wherever they are fighting.

I guess it’s always been this way. Those of us lucky to have food and shelter are thankful that God has chosen us to be the ones with food and shelter.  There, but for the grace of God, go we.

I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same? ICE is picking people off the streets, putting them in detention, sending them to remote parts of the world, breaking up families, and we celebrate Thanksgiving.  There but for the grace of God, go we. Thank you God for making it them who suffer, not us. You must be Great.

In fact though, the circumstances of 1621 and of 2025 are not the same. In 1621, Thanksgiving demonstrated the possibility, the potential, that natives and invaders could get along. In 2025, the natives (formerly the invaders) are circling the wagons and expelling the new iterations of themselves out the country as brutally as possible. And for this, we are to be thankful and to thank our God.

Let’s not be thankful for the flawed country we have today. Let’s define the country we want, work to see it come into being. Then, we can celebrate a true Thanksgiving.

Not a sermon, just a thought (as somebody says).