Thanksgiving and Traditions

Happy American Thanksgiving! Ordinarily we spend the weekend after Turkey Day at ChessieCon, formerly Darkover Grand Council, which has traditionally occurred every Thanksgiving weekend for several decades. Last November they held their first in-person con since 2019. At that time it moved from the hotel where it's been held for many years to a different one in the same general area, north of Baltimore. Attendance turned out to be dismayingly low. Doubtless in part for that reason, the committee decided to cancel this year's event and take time off to regroup and rethink the con's future. On top of that, the hotel it had moved to abruptly closed a few months ago. Where will ChessieCon go next, if anywhere? Will we lose this venerable local SF/F tradition?

Thanksgiving traditions typically include the familiar turkey and its required accessories, e.g., stuffing, potatoes, and gravy. Some households, however, depart from the conventional menu for more adventurous fare. For instance, our second son and his family eschew turkey in favor of entrees such as homemade sushi. Many Americans also consider TV football essential on that day.

In mainline Christian churches, the first Sunday of Advent, the build-up to Christmas, falls on or near the first weekend of December. Most of us now accept as inevitable and proper that the winter holiday shopping and decorating season begins on the day after Thanksgiving. However, when Christmas and other winter-themed displays in stores overlap with Halloween merchandise, and internet merchants advertise "Black Friday" sales starting over a week early, many of us think the extension of the season is going too far. Commercialization of Christmas gifting, though, started almost simultaneously with the invention of the family-centered Christmas as we know it in the nineteenth century. Moreover, people have been complaining about it almost as long.

The popular film A CHRISTMAS STORY, aka the BB gun movie, set around 1940, based on Jean Shepherd's fictionalized memoir IN GOD WE TRUST: ALL OTHERS PAY CASH, illustrates how even before the middle of the twentieth century intensive holiday gift advertising and department store Santas already pervaded the Christmas-season consciousness of American children. Our parents and grandparents didn't experience some newer Christmas traditions that existed in our childhoods and those of our children, because those customs depend on new technology, mainly television. Many people watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, culminating in the arrival of Santa Claus. They also enjoy favorite Christmas specials over and over. Nowadays we don't have to wait for those treasured memories to show up in reruns; we can view them on home video media or streaming services at will. I always watch at least two versions of A CHRISTMAS CAROL every year, usually more. We can also look forward to original programs reliably appearing every December, such as one of my favorites, the annual new CALL THE MIDWIFE Christmas episode.

If our grandparents had been able to peer into the future and note these novel customs, they might have disdained them as soulless products of technology, violating the true spirit of the season. For us and our children, recurring winter holiday movies and TV shows simply became an expected part of the celebration, cherished traditions as much as the tree, the feast, and the presents.

When some earthlings live in artificial habitats on the Moon or Mars or in generation-spanning starships, what holiday traditions will they bring along, and what fresh customs will life in extraterrestrial environments demand? It seems likely that even in locations vastly distant from Earth's solstice cycles, human beings will cling to the core elements of their seasonal celebrations.

Margaret L Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.