So we are set to celebrate Thanksgiving Day in Ireland? Howdy, pardner. More sarsaparilla with your chicken-fried grits? I guess I’ll jest mosey down the sidewalk and get myself a new fanny pack.
Do you see what I am up to here? I am doing an appalling impersonation of an American. I am making an idiot of myself by passing that country’s cultural traits through the liquidiser of my own misunderstanding. Let’s not do that.
President Michael D Higgins is not yet being asked to pardon turkeys on the lawn of Áras an Uachtaráin. But there are moves in that vague direction. Ciarán Cannon TD made headlines last week by suggesting that the extra bank holiday, being considered to recognise those who contributed to countering the pandemic, should fall days after the American holiday. “Creating a new Thanksgiving public holiday and celebrating it on the last Monday in November [the 29th this year] would . . . serve to strengthen the links that exist between Ireland and the United States,” he said.
What a masterpiece of rude capitalism the Halloween switchback was. Let us sell you less-authentic versions of the stuff you invented
Some such tribute to the health workers and other essential services is welcome (even if many of those don't get bank holidays off). But can we please not give the public another opportunity to ape American mores and traditions? It's undignified. It's vulgar. It's something we should have gotten past . . . Agh! Sorry, it's something we should have got past decades ago. You see how this stuff works at you?
A brave few among us have been warning about the danger of creeping Thanksgiving for some time. After all, it has been more than 30 years since, like a crowd of gap-toothed rubes, we allowed the Americans to reimport their version of Halloween back to us. A fine, grim Irish festival (not “holiday”, please) was transformed into an orgy of orange-and-black hyperconsumption. Until the early 1990s, you would have been as likely to encounter a pawpaw in Quinnsworth as a pumpkin. Trick or treating, a greedier bastardisation of various Irish traditions, was unheard of here until Madonna’s middle period.
What a masterpiece of rude capitalism the Halloween switchback was. Let us sell you less-authentic versions of the stuff you invented.
How in the name of blazes did we buy into Black Friday? It was only 10 minutes ago that this more explicit gesticulation to mammon – the day after Thanksgiving – was barely understood east of Martha’s Vineyard. Now, every electrical goods supplier feels required to offer you a cheap telly. Once all that set in it was only a matter of time before Thanksgiving got a hold on Irish culture.
Let us not fool ourselves. There is no possibility whatsoever that the American traditions will not immediately impose themselves on any Irish version. We have, to an even greater extent than our neighbours in the UK, leaped at any opportunity to pull on cowboy hats, scoff burgers and adopt ersatz versions of American-English (this column recently addressed our peculiar habit of pronouncing “lieutenant” in the US fashion).
Many of us still behave towards that nation as we used to behave towards the swaggering Irish-American relative who, on his rare visits to the homeland, cast “candy” around like so much seed as he bragged about the largeness of his automobile. The cultural cringe has still not gone away. Where do our top politicians go on Saint Patty’s Day? Yoo-Ess-Ay! Yoo-Ess-Ay! That’s where.
The yawning gap between January 1st and St Patrick's Day is pleading to be filled with a bank holiday
Supermarkets will relish the opportunity to flog the ingredients for the phantasmagorically disgusting dishes Americans place beside turkey on the last Thursday in November. Yams marinated in Pepsi and baked in a carapace of frosted Reece’s Pieces. Creamed sweetcorn on a bed of raspberry jello. Just about anything – bar anything suited to such treatment – dotted with burnt lumps of glutinous marshmallow.
Nothing says manifest destiny like a dose of type-two diabetes. The Native Americans must have been astonished the pioneers lived long enough to make them unwelcome in their own sprawling land.
We haven’t yet mentioned the embarrassing notion of celebrating what turned out to be the beginning of a genocide. For the past 50 years, Native Americans in New England have organised a National Day of Mourning to coincide with the Thanksgiving Day festivities. Even before then, many non-indigenous citizens struggled to accommodate their celebrations with a history that was less happy for the original inhabitants.
That need not concern us in this column. We move on not because the issue is unimportant, but because there is no reason for us to ever mount this red, white and blue bandwagon. It’s not as if the date is a particularly attractive one for a bank holiday. Thanksgiving falls just a month before Christmas and a month and a week before New Year’s Day. The yawning gap between January 1st and St Patrick’s Day is pleading to be filled. How about Brendan Behan’s birthday on February 9th?
That’s not an entirely serious suggestion, but it makes more sense than one more bout of forelock-tugging to the USA.
Get up the yard with your Thanksgiving.
