How Do My Fellow Freethinkers Celebrate Thanksgiving?

I celebrate Thanksgiving as an homage to good food and good friends - and stay clear of the whole "thankfulness" bit.

I mean, I'm just glad in a general sense that the world is still here (for the moment), the people in my family still have enough food (for the moment), we have warm houses (for the moment) ... Not thankful TO anything, but just generally glad we aren't starving in the streets. I guess I just take the time to appreciate the things I have because it's so easy to get caught up in the things we don't have.

"Thanking" requires a giver and a receiver. Who is the receiver?

I guess I just think of "thanking" in the Thanksgiving variety to be different.

Reflection on all that is good in your life and understanding that it could be so much worse. Doesn't requiring thanking some etheric deity, but I think most of us are thankful for our families and/or friends, and that is best expressed by sharing a time with them. Whether that's the traditional big turkey dinner or seeing a movie or just football, chips and beer.

:) Seriously. That's totally what I was trying to say. :)

But I bet you could have said it with grammar! :-)

preparing the way for a lifestyle that affords us great food, recliner chairs, automatic dishwashers, and computers.

All the people out there right now who maintain much of these things for us: grow our food, make our furniture, keep the water in the pipes and the electricity in the wires, even our lunatic families that are really very entertaining once we take a step back and look at them objectively.

All the plants and animals that have combined to put the feast together for us to eat, giving their lives or the lives of their offspring to nourish us.

There are a lot of recipients out there for our gratitude if we stop and think about it. Needing a sky spook as a clearing house for all the people, plants, and animals isn't necessary.

As the FSM requires.

But I do throw in some "Thanks" but thanks to actually people who actually did something I'm thankful for.

"Thanks to my mother-in-law for preparing this meal." For example.

Despite the "theistic overtones" of the founding of the holiday it is actually one of my favorite holidays. Even for someone like myself who isn't generally into big family gatherings somehow being with everyone on Thanksgiving has always been pleasant for me and of course there's the feast! :)

I ignore all celebrations decreed by others, whether they're religious celebrations or not.

We celebrate our wedding anniversary and family birthdays - days with personal significance.

I take a cue from an old friend of mine. Whenever a holidy appears on the calendar, they have a party. Good food and drink, etc., making music, splashing in the hot tub.

Thanksgiving is a good one because more people can show up because they get days off. We play music into the wee hours, sleep it off and pick up at breakfast.

And now that we're a little older and more mature there's no puke to clean up!

--IMM

doesn't matter what the excuse is! :)

spending time with family and friends. Having some relatively new friends over, so never quite sure when it comes to saying grace with in new company. Doubt there are any Christians among them. With luck, they'll be just as heathen as we are.

But I don't have a big problem with someone saying grace if it is secular in nature, such as being thankful for everyone's health and the wonderful meal that we have to enjoy, etc., as long as they leave God out of it. But who are they thanking then? Thank our lucky stars perhaps?

Dear God, we paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing!

"Bless the meat and damn the skin
Open yer kisser and cram it in!"

make some homemade cranberry sauce, (might try my hand at a lentil loaf this year), make some roasted garlic mashed potatoes, and let my family know I love them.


Oh yeah, and watch the Lions and Cowboys lose.

I am.

--IMM

Then I go to work.

...I had one helluva Thanksgiving today. Even more fun than a few years ago when I spent the T-giving week on holiday in Amsterdam.

But since I'm still in Alexandria, Egypt, I spent the day giving thanks for the intelligence of our long-gone ancestors. And no thanks to the various religious whackeries which destroyed so much of their legacy.

I did this while crawling thru the ancient burial catacombs of El Shogafa and Anfushi here in Alexandria. Many are decorated with a phantasmagorical riot of religious symbology, adapting ancient Egyptian death symbols to the religions of the later Greek and Roman conquerors.

At one tomb in the El Shogafa complex, the Egyptian gods Anubis and Sobek are wearing the uniform of Roman soldiers!

Then a different kind of tomb, the remains of the "daughter library" to the famous Alexandria Library. It's below the Serapeum, the temple destroyed by rioting Xians in 391 CE. You can still see the cubbyholes where the scrolls were stored.

Finally I toured the Quitbay Citadel, a Muslim fort built in 1477 partly from the ruins of the ancient Pharos lighthouse. In one place you can actually see part of the foundations of the lighthouse.

Adding to the Religious Irony, my guide was a young Muslim woman wearing her head-covering and a long black coat.

She made Indiana Jones look like a wimp. The Anfushi tombs are really decaying. We went charging down the steps into one totally dark underground tomb and damn near went swimming--the floor was under water and we couldn't see it until we nearly went off the last step.

Oh, Thanksgiving dinner? Traditional Alexandria hummus-type yummies with a green salad and a whole boiled fish, eaten local style with my fingers.

in general, not toward an imaginary being or entity. What I steer clear of is the mythology - particularly the part where we celebrate genocide or pretend it didn't happen or it was okay - and the gluttony and the disgusting month-long greedfest that begins tomorrow. That I refuse to participate in.

and accepted an invitation from a co-worker instead of just cooking dinner for my 16-year-old son and myself, which I actually would have preferred. So my son's all, "Ugh, why are we doing this," expecting to be bored, but I insist it'll be fun and we should be grateful and blah blah blah.

Last year I had Christmas dinner at this person's house. Same crowd, plus the most annoying guy in the world and his wife. Annoying Guy, who pretends to know everything and never shuts up and never listens and is overbearing to a degree that clearly makes everyone uncomfortable, latches onto my son. He's going on about Bear Bryant and Winston Churchill, and I'm hovering nearby, waiting for a chance to step in and rescue my son. Then he launches into his 3-point plan for success in life: (1) have a Plan B, (2) never give up, and (3) uh ... he forgets the third point.

So I rescue my son and start scheming how to get between him and Annoying Guy at the table. Annoying Guy foils my plan and tries to sit on the other side of my son, but there's a glass of wine at that place that turns out to be his wife's. She makes him sit on the other side of her.

Next thing I know, Mrs. Annoying Guy is blessing the food. Longass wingnutty-sounding prayer that includes thank you for Jesus and this wonderful country where we're so blessed and everything else you could possibly think of to thank an imaginary man in the sky for. I'm recovering from a cold and couldn't stop myself from coughing, it was so long.

"And please send us a leader," adds my co-worker's uncle (who dominated the conversation at Christmas but suddenly has next to nothing to say, undoubtedly because of Annoying Guy) after the amen. Big laughs instead of what I'm expecting, thinking Mr. and Mrs. A.G. are probably conservative.

Later, I googled to see if A.G. actually does what he says he does for a living, because it's hard to imagine someone who can't shut up long enough to take in any information doing this job successfully. It's true. I also found a resolution thanking him for serving as a Democratic Party precinct chair from the House of Representatives in his home state. They were probably glad it was over.

I was certainly glad when dinner was over and vowed to decline future invitations to Thanksgiving dinner. I didn't enjoy sitting through this dumb blessing. It's really starting to annoy me how the food blessers just expect everyone to go along with their custom, and everyone does. I'm getting tired of being polite.

though I wouldn't rule out all future invitations. I suppose it depends where you live.

The friends my wife invited over turned out to be just as nonreligious as we were, so when the critical moment came to say grace or not, we all just looked at each other, my son even offered that it would be all right if someone wanted to say grace. But no one accepted the offer and started our meal. What a relief!

Mostly I feel guilty on account of my son. He'd have had a much better time if we'd done our usual thing by ourselves. Dinner with my mom or his dad's relatives and girlfriend would have been much more difficult. He always visits his dad at Christmas, so our little Thanksgiving by ourselves has become a kind of tradition. I don't usually get the single-person charity invitations until Christmas, and then I'm glad to accept them. I'm also perfectly comfortable being by myself. I just refuse to drive 400 miles to hang with my family when I know it's going to be toxic. The whole holiday thing is a big forced march that I stay out of as much as possible.

Blessing the food did annoy me. Mr. Blabby annoyed me, too, but nowhere near as much as he annoyed my son. On the other hand, he gave me yet another opportunity to talk about not being upset by people with obvious mental problems and how to disengage from this particular kind of problem. I enjoyed the other company. I spent less on a bottle of wine than I'd have spent on dinner for two. My hands don't still feel funny from stuffing a turkey, and I'm not still pigging out on turkey and stuffing sandwiches.

Weighing that against the parental guilt, including that of only being able to do so much to ease the mixed feelings and hassle associated with having to go with Dad at Christmas, adds up to not accepting Thanksgiving invitations for another couple of years.

Nice of your son to offer to say grace.

rather he offered that it would be OK if someone wanted to. He has many more social skills than I did at that age (15), or even now for that matter. I've helped raise a couple of fine and tolerant atheists. :)

cook the food I'm eating.

and eat

and sleep

and eat some more

(after I cook and cook and cook and cook)

Then I hang out with family and friends

Then I wash dishes and wash dishes and wash dishes and wash dishes