Why We've Failed to Ruin Thanksgiving

By WALTER SHAPIRO

Who really thinks about Thanksgiving? Most adults absorb the larger meaning of the holiday as part of the first-grade catechism (Pilgrims, friendly Indians, a day for offering thanks) and rarely move beyond Care-Bears sentimentality. This built-in ickiness is a pity, since it tends to overshadow the symbolic significance of Thanksgiving, that most unrepentantly old- fashioned of American celebrations, that patriotic heirloom that nobody has figured out a way to ruin.

For nearly 150 years, ever since a women's magazine called Godey's Lady's Book began championing the cause of an annual day of Thanksgiving, the topic has been drowning in a syrupy sea of treacle. Almost every Thanksgiving cliche was in place by the mid-19th century: snow-thatched New England farmhouses, menus of turkey and cranberry sauce, families bowing their heads in grateful prayer, and wayward children dramatically returning home for the occasion. Even Abraham Lincoln in ushering in the modern national Thanksgiving holiday could not rise above what a latter-day President might call "the banality mode." Just weeks before he composed the soaring sentences of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln began his 1863 Thanksgiving proclamation with this hackneyed conceit: "The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies."

Today, of course, healthful skies mask the hole in the ozone layer. But in a suddenly peaceful world where the doors of the Iron Curtain have rusted open, no one should ridicule the simple giving of thanks. Each of us has private reasons for gratitude, since in so many ways 1989 has been a bountiful year. For me, I am sincere in my appreciation for the way the greenhouse effect has allowed Indian summer to stretch on into the college basketball season. Moreover, I consider it a personal blessing that Jackie Mason was canceled, Donald Trump failed in his efforts to make his name synonymous with American Airlines, Ronald Reagan managed to return from Japan and no trend spotter has successfully named the '90s before they happen.

Yet Thanksgiving represents more than a litany of good tidings and an amalgam of turkey-time truisms. There is a stubborn rectitude to the holiday itself, reminiscent of its stiff-necked Pilgrim forbearers. More than any other date on the calendar, Thanksgiving has remained private and personal, devoid of the tinsel trappings that mar the rest of contemporary life. On this ecumenical holiday, Americans are allowed to be as prayerful or as secular as they choose, with no one complaining that they have somehow taken the thanks out of Thanksgiving.

For all the public prattle about family values, no other holiday brings generations together without the lure of anything more tangible than a good dinner. Think of the novelty of an extended family forced to spend the day doing little other than talking, eating and digesting. Distractions are gloriously limited: the malls are closed and the televised sports offerings sparse. Unlike New Year's Eve, no one feels compelled to have the time of one's life or broods unduly when reality fails to conform to these exaggerated expectations. The perfect Thanksgiving is timeless, as families replicate their own familiar rituals, complete with the unconscious re-enactment of parental conflicts and sibling rivalries that may date back to the Eisenhower Administration.

No gastronomical theory can explain the enduring appeal of the Thanksgiving dinner. The traditional menu is largely a 19th-century re-creation of Pilgrim and Indian fare, and none of these groups normally claim membership in the world's great culinary traditions. But miraculously the meal remains a monument to pre-microwave American cooking. Not even McDonald's has had the audacity to create McTurkey, nor does Domino's deliver cranberry pizza. So too are the food faddists outflanked, as sun-dried tomatoes, imported chevre and oat-bran anything give way to overstuffed lassitude.

Americans have grown inured to crass commercialism taken to excess, with corporate sponsorship profaning everything from bowl games to the Bill of Rights. But somehow Thanksgiving has resisted the blandishments of an age of avarice. How the greeting-card sharpies and the flower-power florists must lament a national holiday in which they are doomed to play such a minor role. For if one cares to send the very best, one flies home for Thanksgiving. Even the TV networks have never figured out a way to transform Thanksgiving into a prime-time pageant, which is why the Macy's Parade still takes place in God's own morning light.

Politicians are blissfully silent on Thanksgiving. Such restraint is appropriate for a holiday that commemorates one of the rare occasions when the white man treated the Indian with dignity and respect. But public officials may also be chastened by the experience of Franklin Roosevelt, the only modern President to try to tamper with Thanksgiving. Back in 1939, Roosevelt touched off a patriotic uprising when he issued a proclamation unilaterally shifting Thanksgiving from the then customary last Thursday in November (the 30th) to the fourth Thursday (the 23rd) as a way of granting Depression-era merchants a longer Christmas selling season. F.D.R.'s Thanksgiving formula was later codified into federal law, but not before Ogden Nash composed the following couplet:

Thanksgiving, like Ambassadors, Cabinet officers and

others smeared with political ointment,

Depends for its existence on Presidential appointment.

What adds a quaint, almost innocent flavor to this bygone controversy is the outmoded notion that department stores wait patiently until the end of Thanksgiving to unveil Santa's workshop. Now, of course, four-year-olds are still gorging on Halloween candy when the Saturday-morning ads begin their incessant shilling for Christmas toys. In a nation where the mall never palls and seven-days-a-week shopping seems enshrined as a civic religion, Thanksgiving stands out as an oasis of tranquillity and a reminder of the values that once tempered America's materialism. This Thursday give thanks for the one holiday that cannot be bought.