Post 260 - November 26, 2020

Day 260…

A few days ago, our neighbor down the hall told us that she had bought an 18lb turkey.

Michael offered to cook it.

That’s how it started. He then decided to bake some bread. Two loaves to eat and two to cut into cubes to make sausage stuffing with.

Then our neighbor’s daughter announced that she was going to make cornbread. And some mashed potatoes. Our neighbor’s son is making a vegan casserole. Our neighbor, herself, is making some cranberry sauce. I picked up a sour cream apple walnut pie from the Little Pie Company on 43rd Street and Michael decided to bake a peach pie to go with it.

We are going to set up a table in the hall where we will all leave what we brought or made. Then, we’ll take turns serving ourselves and bring it back to our respective apartments where we can zoom with our families as we eat.

Some neighbors from the first floor are going to join in, and as of last night one from the fourth floor who is making a sweet potato mash. The eccentric lady who lives in the apartment next door to us is participating, too.

The Macy’s Parade is on television this morning. Most of it was filmed over the last few days down in Herald Square in front of Macy’s. I think that the floats are going past the store live this morning but without spectators present.

Last night the block between Broadway and 9th was already closed off. There’s a kind of street-sized decal that they put down on the area in front of the main doors of the store to create a playing space and an attractive backdrop for the camera shots.

In a normal year, last night, the streets surrounding the American Museum of Natural History would have been filled with the giant balloons being inflated for this morning’s parade. Since we’ve lived up here on the upper West Side, we’ve been able to walk through them most years. Last night, they secretly inflated the ones that are going to participate downtown near the store. They are only going to travel down the one city block between the two avenues.

Today is a day for gratitude.

Yesterday, President-elect Biden addressed the nation with a Thanksgiving message of optimism and hope. The day before he introduced his initial cabinet picks and they each spoke.

It was hard not to cry watching a team of people vowing to put the needs of the country ahead of their own. They committed to us, the American people, and to our safety and well-being. They committed to reestablishing our presence on the global stage and to rejoining climate and military treaties that we have strayed from. Included in the group of experienced professionals were a number of firsts in terms of gender and ethnicity.

For a group of people unused to public speaking, they got their messages across spectacularly.

Broadway Cares / Equity Fights Aids have been able to send the Actors Fund over $6.5 million for their COVID-19 Emergency fund since March when the pandemic took hold. In addition, they have sent over $5 million in additional funding to support the Fund’s net of social services.

Last year, $2.3 million worth of grants were awarded to 135 food and service organizations around the country. This year, they are hoping to make similar, although possibly slightly reduced, commitments to those remarkable groups.

With hope on the horizon, the more than 15 million food insecure homes in our country are more in need of assistance than ever. In Arizona yesterday, volunteers at St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix distributed food to a two-mile long line of cars. In Ohio, at the Freestore Foodbank in Cincinnati, volunteers provided food for people who had waited in line for as long as four hours.

There may not be crowds of people lining the streets of New York City this morning and we may not all be gathering together to share a meal, but at its heart, that’s not what today is about.

During the Protestant Reformation under Henry VIII in England, the massive number of Catholic holidays on the calendar - there were 95 in addition to the year’s 52 Sundays - were reduced to 27. Puritans wished to eliminate them completely and replace them, instead, with days of Thanksgiving in response to specific events - the end of a war or the passing of a plague or something similar that effected the entire community.

When the Puritans left England for the New World, they brought that idea over with them.

There was a well-documented celebration after the 1619 arrival of a group of 38 settlers in Charles City County in Virginia. As part of their charter, the day that they arrived was to be celebrated yearly and kept holy as “a day of thanksgiving to almighty God.”

Two years later, the feast that we have come to think of as the first Thanksgiving happened in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It was prompted by a good harvest and a desire to thank the Native Americans who had helped them get through the previous winter.

This morning a group of tribespeople from the Wampanoag Nation offered a land acknowledgment and a blessing to honor the Wampanoag and Lenape people - the traditional owners of the land on which New York City stands.

This kind of gesture is a normal and expected part of Australian life in regard to the Aboriginal people. This is the first time that I have seen it done here. Though long overdue, it was beautiful and moving. A step in the right direction.

Abraham Lincoln was the person who established Thanksgiving as a national holiday in the United States in 1863. Before that, it was celebrated haphazardly on different days in different states. A woman named Sarah Josepha Hale had been badgering politicians for over forty years at that point to make it an official day. Some of that pressure may have influenced the President to finally make it happen.

Lincoln set the day for the final Thursday in November specifically to celebrate the Union successes in the war. It took seven more years until after the reconstruction for the holiday to be properly incorporated.

In 1939 Franklin Roosevelt moved the day to the next to last Thursday in November but then two years later changed the day to the fourth Thursday where it has remained to this day.

The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade happened in 1924. Store employees marched in colorful costumes and enthroned Santa on the balcony of the 34th Street entrance. 250,000 people attended and it was so popular that it became an annual event. The first balloon, which was Mickey Mouse, was added in 1934.

The parade has happened every year since except for 1942-1944 because rubber and helium were needed for the war effort.

As a nation, it feels like we have come through a war. We have lost so many people and so many more are sick. More of us than ever before are without jobs - whole industries are at a standstill.

But there is hope.

Attacks on our democracy and social norms, on simple basic decency seem to have been beaten back - at least for the moment.

The war isn’t won yet, but nor was it won in 1863 when Lincoln set the holiday. It wasn’t won either when those first settlers celebrated. They still had years of hardship and toil ahead of them.

Taking this day to celebrate everything that we have achieved over these last few weeks seems to me to be perfect timing. There is cause for optimism. Change is on the horizon.

We may not all be able to gather together today, but we are all still all together regardless.Let’s take the day to celebrate and be grateful for what we do have, rather than focus on what is missing.

I, for one, am grateful for all of you.

Today may not be the day we were expecting, but it is the day that we have been given. We here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan plan to make the most of it that we can. I hope that all of you can, too. There will be plenty of days ahead of us that will be challenging, but here’s to taking a break from all of that today.

Michael is clattering around the kitchen in a frenzy. There’s a lot of muttering. I think he’s enjoying the heck out of himself.

Santa just arrived in front of Macy’s. The holiday season has begun.

A very Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, with much love from me and mine.

Grateful.