Friendsgiving, a new tradition to be thankful for
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The need to create some sort of alternative label confuses me, but then again I grew up semi-nomadic.
honestly the tradition of thanksgiving is grounded in a a disgusting past that is branded as a beautiful time to give thanks
the story goes :: a group of immigrants came to a strange country they felt was empty enough to set up a home for themselves but when winter came they were wholly unprepared for life in this new environment
there they laid dying, starving, and the natives to the land came and shared all they had with these immigrants and showed them how and what to plant in winter soil
the immigrants survived that winter and we now give thanks, but the following spring they used their regrown strengths to decimate the population of the natives in order to take their land
fuck honoring that
now if you want to say you like getting together with family and friends for big meals, but we are all so busy we need to designate at least once a year it must be on the third thursday of november i am all for it
just call it something else so we can leave behind the baggage of the long since skewed bullshit that is thanksgiving and keep the stuff that it's really about: interacting over food
friendsgiving? ok..?
some friends and i began to grow busy in different directions so we organised a big group meal once a week, we always just called it our 'sunday destiny'
.
also, fuck columbus day too: " Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. ".. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the US .. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
And popular culture doesn't depict it as being about that, either; it's a time to give thanks, and be with friends and family, and eat lots of food, and go shopping soon, but I never see it depicted as even ostensibly being about the history of it.
So in my experience, you're sort of preaching to the choir, and, to extend the metaphor, EVERYBODY is in the choir.
If I'm mistaken, and someone reading this does celebrate Thanksgiving to honor the history of it, I'd be interested to hear from you.
> The need to create some sort of alternative label confuses me
Also, I work in a hostel and these past weeks I have seen innumerable 20+ year staff members tell the classic pilgrim and indian story to many foreigners questions of 'what is thanksgiving'
So perhaps my personal experience struck me sensitive this morning, but I also feel the standard menu, which seriously requires a revisit, also continues to tell this story on many tables every thanksgiving across the states
How many of us have heard heckled from the pews this year, or thought themselves, when a suggestion to change a traditional staple: 'how can you call it thanksgiving without turkey'potatoes'pumpkin pie'whatever'; which is a direct effect of the history and personal traditions of the holiday
I'm not sure "rebrand" is the right word; "Friendsgiving" is a deviation from the well-established norm of spending Thanksgiving with family, so giving it a separate, derivative name doesn't seem inappropriate. I myself am in the middle of organizing a separate celebration with friends, on Saturday, and I'm also calling it something that ends in "-sgiving", because we're doing it in the general spirit of (obviously not-historic) Thanksgiving, but it doesn't fit the cultural standard (on Thursday, with family).
> I have seen innumerable 20+ year staff members tell the classic pilgrim and indian story to many foreigners questions of 'what is thanksgiving'
If I were asked that, I think I would give the same answer. Though I would also tell someone what Christmas was about, if asked, without feeling the need to explain how I don't believe it or for what reasons.
I also don't think I'd add the "disclaimer" about how messed up the whole original Thanksgiving stuff was unless someone pressed me for it or inquired further, though if I think about it, I'm not sure why; it almost seems like a separate question to me. Interesting.
What do you think?
How does a native American reservation celebrate the third Thursday?
My deliberate disdain for some cultural artifacts are mainly to be inclusive to those who are potentially marginalized by the status quo, Full inclusion is a highest value of mine that I try to assert in in my actions and thoughts
Christmas, like all religious activities, is exclusive to everyone who believes outside a community's line, and as such is abhorrent to me, and i state the same to anyone who asks my understanding of it
It feels a scientific approach: your world is flat unless you choose to extend your sight beyond the horizon; and I'm always on the lookout for horizons I have yet to extend
I did one of these, I think, for Roger Faulkner, Mr /proc (not the linux one, the original one).
Some back story, I needed to learn something from Roger, I was working in building 5 at Sun with the rest of the Sun kernel people, I was upstairs, Roger was downstairs, whatever. So I was pretty junior and I walked into Roger's office and he ignored me. I was sitting on his desk next to his monitor, he was looking at the monitor and typing away. I waited.
He eventually said something like "what the fuck do you want?"
And I said "I want to know about <something I've long since forgotten>"
And he said "why should I teach you about that?"
And I said "because I'm going to sit here and belch and fart until you do"
He laughed and we became friends.
We were both nerds with very few friends but when we connected over technology, that's a bond. It's a bond that is hard to put into words and have people understand, but we bonded (you guys should get the nerd bond. I hope). It turned into a thanksgiving at my flat in San Francisco many years ago (I have a vague feeling that Theo might have been there but I dunno). In some ways it was a sad nerd fest, in other ways it was so cool. I wouldn't trade that for anything, yeah it was nerdy, and yeah it was some dudes hanging out without any girls that we so wanted, but we had fun, it was a good time.
I'm all for thanksgiving being a place where you can hang out with your friends. Lots of people are away from their families, so go gather in the nerds, whatever, gather in the people that you care about. Who you gather is up to you but I'd vote for gathering in the people who are mostly ignored. Lots of them have lots to offer.
Don't get me wrong, Thanksgiving with friends can be awesome, but you need to make time for family. You can't assume they will always be there.
I find traveling home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas is prohibitively expensive and difficult to acquire sufficient time off for both from work. I usually opt for taking no time off Thanksgiving week, holding a Friendsgiving, and then being free to spend more days with the fam at Xmas time. Friendsgiving is not always an excuse to avoid family.
I'm an introvert and it is tough meeting people. I'm not saying it is easy to move out of your comfort zone, but it is necessary. If you want to be more social and have more friends, then make conscious effort be more social and make more friends.
Just to be clear, both of those things are choices one makes, not excuses to be made.
I still disagree with the assertion that "how many friends you do or don't have is entirely up to you". It may be true in some extremely narrow sense, but if it came down to it how many people would give up the spouse they love because they were the problem, or their children because they were, or drop everything and move to where people were more similar to themselves?
Right, because someone with no friends probably have never thought or believed that it is their own fault for being shy/uninteresting/boring (and that they're shy/uninteresting/boring in part because ... they have no friends). It has probably never crossed their mind at all.
> I'm an introvert and it is tough meeting people. I'm not saying it is easy to move out of your comfort zone, but it is necessary. If you want to be more social and have more friends, then make conscious effort be more social and make more friends.
In order to be social, you need to try to be social. Right.
So he's not saying that you 'have to try and be social', he's saying 'work at it'. That means doing things that you may not want to do right now, to pay-off later.
Who believes that there are any alternatives? Shy people and people with social anxiety (etc.) don't have a reputation for spontaneously becoming outgoing and so on.
There's (not always, but) often a tangible point where my acquaintances tend to turn into friends. It's usually some bonding experience. We stayed up all night and did X. We drank together and had a heart to heart. We both love doing Y and spent a lot of time doing that. We travelled together. We suffered through college classes. We spent weekends hanging out together. We spent years talking on IRC. Often there's also some something about level of trust. Someone reveals something about themselves. They talk about something personal that they normally wouldn't. Etc. Absent either of those, my acquaintances tend to stay acquaintances.
On the flipside, I've found that keeping around people who don't value you, don't have your best interests at heart or intentionally cause you to feel bad in any way is just a bad idea. Wanting to become better friends doesn't make it so. It's a two sided thing. Really, I love most of my friends and I'd sacrifice much for them, so when it comes to people like this, I don't have time for that shit.
I have a relatively small number of close friends, and I don't get to spend time with all of them all the time. And as time passes and life happens, friendships form and fade (and I find that the good ones can kickstart right back - even years later.) All that is fine and natural.
It's really about mutual happiness, fun and sharing, and the rest doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be complicated.
Hope this helps!
If you ever find the time to write down more of your thoughts about friendships I'd definitely be interested in reading them.
I struggle to make new friends. The standard advice seems to be to go to meetups, do volunteering, and join sports clubs. I've tried those and can't get them to work for me. There's something more to it than just being in attendance.
I think you're definitely right about that tangible point where things change, and I never manage to quite get there. I don't know if that tipping point is something you can instigate or if you just have to leave it to chance.
For me it would not be a problem if I could just resolve the female companionship problem (or lack thereof). I'm not even shy, it just seems that if I don't pay them women tend to ignore me ...
I live in Los Angeles, which attracts a lot of young people with a lot of different dreams. The reality is that with the combination of only a small amount of vacation time we receive in the US, living a long distance from family, and not having enough money, it often means that you can't go back for all of the holidays and need to prioritize. For me, since my hometown high school friends all went back around Christmas, I chose that time to spend with family. Since we were stuck here in the new city, we decided to have a Thanksgiving and jokingly referred to it as something like "Thanksgiving for the displaced youth of Los Angeles." It turned out that a lot of people we knew here were in the same situation, because turnout was good. I'm also fortunate to have friends from all over the world, and since it isn't an international holiday they didn't have much reason to return home.
We continue to grow closer as a group every year, and as people have brought their friends we have made new friends too. It has gone from something we did because we were all stuck in the same place together to something that we actually seek out and look forward to. Now we even have friends come in from thousands of miles away who have since moved to other cities or even out of the country.
Now I can afford to go back for Thanksgiving, but I don't see myself doing it. It's not that I don't cherish the time I spend with family, but now I also have a holiday which, previously an afterthought, is a very important day when I get to spend time with people I deeply care about.
Featuring the Airing of Grievances, Feats of Strength, an aluminum pole, Festivus dinner, and more!
(British here, so no Thanksgiving)