Happy Thanksgiving

[Muad’Dib]

Happy Thanksgiving ðð¦ð½! Stay safe this year!

[Notes_Norton]

+1 - good wishes to all.

[Joe Muscara]

I'm thankful for this place and the friends I have met here.

[Anderton]

I'm thankful for so many things there isn't space to list them all.

 

Be excellent to each other

[KuruPrionz]

All my best to everyone, life is sweet!

[MoodyBluesKeys]

Happy Thanksgiving, all.

We are truly blessed.

[Greg Mein]

Our plans changed but my wife and I had a fantastic Thanksgiving meal, just the two of us. I enjoyed just staying home and doing that, I'm not usually a fan of huge gatherings anyway. She's improving and doing much better and I've been back to my old self for a while now. I hope everyone else had a fantastic Thanksgiving as well!

[Mike Rivers]

I had a long time friend over for dinner. She's been host a weekly folk music radio show on various local stations for over 50 years, so naturally we talked about Alice's Restaurant, Arlo Guthrie, and the currently active GoFundMe campaign for Alice, who, at 80, is in poor health and has outlived her savings. No royalties for being a character in a well known song.

 

My friend Mary's daughter gave her a cast-off iPhone so the family could have a Zoom meeting with visuals (Mary is pretty darn analog and does her Zooming MOP (Mit Out Picture - look up MOS) from an ancient PC. We couldn't find the button on it to turn WiFi access on - so much (again) for a clear user interface.

 

Couldn't find a small enough turkey, so I roasted a leg of lamb. I like lamb leftovers better than turkey leftovers, even once a year.

[MoodyBluesKeys]

Wini and I went out mid-afternoon Wednesday for a "pre" Thanksgiving meal at a local Mexican restaurant. You can get tacos and burritos with real steak tips instead of ground beef for only $0.75 extra. Enough food to bring over half home, for our actual "already prepared, just warm up" Thanksgiving meal. The usual group meeting at my daughter's home was cancelled. Wini's daughter that lives here is a MSN at the local hospital's surgical center, and she came over after work yesterday, for a get-together. Since I KNOW that she observes all the infection control protocols, we had a good get-together.

I had previously recorded about a 40 minute video that was aired by my church on Wednesday night, as an on-line only presentation on the church FB channel. It was on the First Thanksgiving (technically first one with a meal/feast, since Jamestown, VA held a prayer service a few years before the Mayflower arrived in 1620. It went into the history of the Pilgrims, my 10th great-grandfather was the spiritual leader, and just why freedom of religion and separation of church and state are so important.

Interestingly, the Encyclopedia Britannica still to this day calls them "traitors."

 

All good.

[Muad’Dib]

Was there any mention of the Puritans? Or the Massacre of the Pequot and Wampanoag of 1637? Or that Small Pox did it"s share of damage too? What many Americans claim as the first Thanksgiving feast is a Myth.

 

Also not everyone celebrates Thanksgiving!

[Anderton]

I have a different attitude about holidays - we get to decide what they're about, and when we celebrate them Like, as far as I'm concerned, every day is my GF's birthday because she was born. Every day is thanksgiving because regardless of its origins, I'm pretty thankful for a lot of things, not the least of which is I'm on the right side of the ground. Historically speaking, Christmas just co-opted the feast of Saturnalia - historians (and biblical scholars) are pretty sure Christ wasn't born in December. But it's the middle of winter, and people need a party.

 

If anything, I think we need more excuses to celebrate something, more days to do something other than work, and more opportunities to spend time with loved ones. I think I'm going to celebrate Festivus this year

 

As to the past, let's face it...people were pretty ignorant about a lot of stuff. It might seem that's still the case, but overall, a large part of humanity has gotten better. It was only 150 years that England - supposedly a civilized country - decided hanging, drawing, and quartering people wasn't really cool. Yes, genocide still happens, but it hasn't reached the levels it did in the past (even the recent past). Let's hope it stays that way.

 

The reality is that the veneer of civilization is thin, and humans can easily fall into major suckage. Think of how gorgeous Hawaii is, how bountiful it is, and how much damage Hawaiians did to each other long before James Cook ever showed up.

 

The past matters very much as a point of reference, and to warn us there are certain paths we should definitely not re-visit (as well as some we should). But as to right now, today becomes yesterday in 24 hours. What matters is the future, and laying the groundwork for a better one. It's good to be informed by the mistakes of the past so that we avoid them, but there's nothing we can do to change the past. We only have the power to change the future.

[Greg Mein]

It was on the First Thanksgiving (technically first one with a meal/feast, since Jamestown, VA held a prayer service a few years before the Mayflower arrived in 1620. It went into the history of the Pilgrims, my 10th great-grandfather was the spiritual leader, and just why freedom of religion and separation of church and state are so important.

Interestingly, the Encyclopedia Britannica still to this day calls them "traitors."

 

All good.

 

Fascinating stuff. I recently found out from familysearch.org that tracing my family line back through my maternal grandmother leads to my 8th great grandfather, Samuel Fuller, who arrived on the Mayflower at the age of 12 with his parents. Sadly his parents died that first winter but he went on to marry and have nine children.