AU CONTRAIRE: THE OCCASIONAL NOTE FROM PETER LOFFREDO

Here’s a T-giving post from our pal, Pete of Full Permission Living

Well, you know I couldn’t resist this one, being the curmudgeon that I am about kids ruling the roost in our overindulgent times. This did my heart good – from the Wall Street Journal Op-ed page yesterday:

Thanksgiving: Great American Holiday, or The Greatest American Holiday?" by Joseph Epstein

…Thanksgiving does have the absence of the heavy hand of dreary gift giving that has put the groans in Christmas, the moans in Hanukkah.

And no one has written treacly Thanksgiving songs, comparable to White Christmas and Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire, which, I suspect, have helped make Christmas one of the prime seasons for suicide. Let us not speak Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, of whose travail we shall all have heard more than our fill as we ride up elevators and pass along the aisles of department stores.

For some time in America we have, of course, been living under Kindergarchy, or rule by children. If children do not precisely rule us, then certainly all efforts, in families where the smallish creatures still roam, are directed to relieving their boredom if not (hope against hope) actually pleasing them.

Let us be thankful that Thanksgiving has not yet fallen to the Kindergarchy, as has just about every other holiday on the calendar, with the possible exceptions of Yom Kippur and Ramadan. Thanksgiving is not about children. It remains resolutely an adult holiday about grown-up food and drink and football.