We have returned to classes, now teachers and students once again, if only for another week-and-a-half. I drove back to Athens with a trunk-full of leftover turkey, and nothing to declare at the border except that the holiday was a sweet, temporary reunion with my family.
The long drive back to Athens gave me time to reflect on holidays past. Deep into the pastoral quiet of winter, when, standing in the flurries on the end of the cleared drive, standing the half-barrel of the snow shovel near my head, feeling nearly like the pitchforked farmer of American Gothic, my head concealed in the cowl of my jacket, it is easy to feel at peace. If that is Dec. 18th and the Christmas holidays, the time when I visit family members whose security and stability is measurable by the length of their drive and the time it takes to shovel it - Thanksgiving is the chaotic pointillism of fallen leaves and football and food. I have visited my immediate family each Thanksgiving, almost, since first leaving home for my undergraduate studies. I suppose you know the feeling of “going back,” and of feeling the timeless sense of childhood once again, stretching both before and behind you, even if continued childhood is now an illusion. Gone, for that long weekend, are the undergrad apartments where there are no snow-clearing duties, gone are the non-meals where there are no dish-clearing, dish-washing, and dish-drying lines of relatives, the relief staff of the mothers and fathers who have cleaned and cooked and carved the meat. Gone are the apartments and the drinks at night, the late-night television and later nights studying. Gone, you might say, is independence. Instead, Thanksgiving brings in young nephews and nieces, spilled things, shared washrooms, and beds normally unused. (What happened to your childhood room? Mine became a sewing room when I went to graduate school, the boyhood hockey cards traded out for throw pillows and a Pfaff.)
When Thanksgiving comes smashing in like a butterball (with apologies to Miley Cyrus and thanks to Carrie Underwood), almost finishing off the fall semester, what does it do? The Thanksgiving holiday wrecks the individualist and - from a holiday point of view - what seems solid and even inescapable is family and tradition. That poses something of a problem for a rebel-culture like the United States’, for a frontier culture, and for the culture of the proud individualist. Where are these individualists? Not on Ohio University’s campus, where, according to the Post, only an estimated 170 students stayed last Thanksgiving. (The total Athens campus head count last fall was 21,514, according to the Compass.) For all of you rugged individualists, Thanksgiving is an occasion for a certain amount of cognitive unrest — America is rugged individualism and God and apple pie, but to say that these elements of the good life go together without tension is like saying that you can paint a fence over in red and blue and white, all at once.
With a belly full of turkey and stuffing, mind you, and an earful of family advice, I ask myself: Is there a trump card to be played in the game between country, family and self? Can we at the same time honor those things that are important to us as a community, and respect those liberties (and goals) that we have as individuals?
As they say, food for thought.
Chris Barker is Ohio University’s Thomas W. Smith Postdoctoral Fellow in U.S. Legal and Constitutional History and teaches for OU’s History Department.
