EDITORIAL: How Can I Celebrate Thanksgiving?
American Thanksgiving is a confusing holiday for me. The older I get, the more I learn about why we celebrate Thanksgiving and the real story about what happened between the Pilgrims and Native Americans. I learned that the Thanksgiving holiday the United States celebrates today was created during the American Civil War to help foster national pride. The “original Thanksgiving” story we were told as children, with English separatists and Indians eating peacefully together, was mostly a fabrication: it left out the part about early colonizers killing Indians, and in some cases deliberately infecting them with deadly diseases.
I appreciate having a day to reflect on our blessings, stay home from work, and love my family. But I think it’s past time for us to reflect seriously on the mistakes of our past. When we insist on telling the same sanitized story, it not only continues hundreds of years of ignoring the real harm my ancestors caused, but it doesn’t teach us anything about how to react in the future. Would you want to be in a relationship with someone who refused to ever acknowledge their mistakes or the harm they caused you?
This year for Thanksgiving I want to count my blessings, and reflect on how we can do better as a culture—and how I can do better as a person.
Let me add that this Tuesday is “Giving Tuesday” and that Adventist Today is an organization run entirely on donations from readers like you. Please, please, please: go to AToday.org/donate and give something this Tuesday.
And if you don’t enjoy reading them, you can donate for that too! At Adventist Today we pride ourselves on printing a variety of opinions from a wide range of people—so show some appreciation for our diversity by donating.
November 25, 2023
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Our year-end fundraiser starts on Tuesday, with the internationally recognized Giving Tuesday event. Please click here to give on Giving Tuesday, and help us to kick off a successful fundraiser.
Today’s ATSS class (1:30 PM Eastern) with Reinder Bruinsma can be joined here.
Direct zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82402251933 Passcode: ELLENWHITE (all caps)
ATSS recording with Nathan Brown can be watched here.
Join our Weekly Update mailing list here.
Our donation page can be accessed here.
