

Chan Lowe: Thanksgiving 2012

When the Pilgrims set sail from Leiden back in the early 17th century, if any of them had ever heard of China it was probably from fantastical tales spun by storytellers. After a less-than-relaxing cruise, they managed to disembark in the New World where they planted some crops, and eventually held a feast to celebrate a successful first harvest (this ensured that they wouldn’t starve to death their first winter).


We know that the locals they encountered didn’t pull them over, harass them, profile them, ask for their papers, or deport them back to Europe. They may or may not have joined them at the First Thanksgiving (this is still in dispute).


What neither the Pilgrims nor their surprised hosts could know at the time was that the Middle Kingdom would figure so enormously in commemorating their little pot luck hundreds of years later. That by the year 2012, it would become integral to the celebration that participants would push back from the table and immediately rush out to something called a mall. Here, they would ritually fight their way past other shoppers in order to be among the first to buy the latest exotic bauble spewed forth from the sweatshops of Cathay (now called China).


I think we should credit—or blame—Marco Polo for all this. He was the first Westerner to bring back containerized cargo from China full of heavily marked-up cheap stuff that the home folks didn’t make, but realized they had a hankering for.


I’m not sure what the point of all this is, but there’s something quintessentially American about a narrative that involves Indians, English refugees who arrived via Holland, Asians and an Italian adventurer. That we should all give thanks for it…I think.

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