At the risk of sounding like a killjoy, I pass along this
suggestion for your next Thanksgiving dinner from the late Christopher Hitchens, which appeared in a 2005
piece in the Wall Street Journal in the new posthumous collection
of his occasional pieces (And Yet . . . , Simon & Schuster).
Hitchens recalled the origin of the holiday during our civil war:
As with so many fine things, it results from the
granite jaw and the unhypocritical speech of Abraham Lincoln. It seemed to him,
as it must have seemed in his composition of the Gettysburg Address, that there
ought to be one day that belonged exclusively to all free citizens of a
democratic republic. . . . The Union had just been preserved from every kind of
hazard and fanaticism: just be grateful. If there were to be any ceremonial or
devotional moment at Thanksgiving, and I am sure that I wish that there were
not, it still might not kill the spirit of the thing if Lincoln’s second
inaugural were to be read aloud, or at least printed on a few place mats.
This article appears in Dec 3-9, 2015.
