TGIT

Thursday’s an awkward day to have a holiday. In some professions, a Thursday holiday translates into a blissful four-day weekend, and if I worked in one of those professions, I’d probably be ranting about something else, like candy cigarettes, or Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor. Another time, perhaps. Another time.

 

The way things are now, last Friday was a regular workday, and workdays that follow straight on the heels of a festive national event never feel quite right. If a holiday is punctuation, then celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday is like an exclamation point right in the middle of a sentence. It’s a headliner playing before the opening band. It’s weird.

 

Not that I’m complaining about a day off, mind you. Every year, it’s a mind-bending ritual, spending a random weekday in front of a football game, cramming my face with can-shaped cranberry goop, and passing out face-first in a dinner plate caked with congealed gravy. It’s not an experience one typically has in the middle of the week, or, you know, ever. In fact, if it weren’t for Thanksgiving, I might never have discovered the perverse joy of chasing banana bread with gooey pie and a still-dripping turkey heart. Stop me when this starts getting gross.

 

It’s a glutton’s delight, but its placement is curious. Why Thursday? Thanksgiving is a secular holiday – not like Christmas, which is consistently held on the same date each year, one determined by men who probably knew Latin and wore robes that vaguely resembled Snuggies. The placement of Thanksgiving is completely arbitrary, so even if it was settled during an era when the typical two-day weekend had yet to exist, the very nature of its genesis suggests that it could be changed with relatively little effort. Thursday is ingrained as a tradition, granted. But frankly, a lazy three-day stretch of meaningless sports and too-tight belt straps is a tradition I’d be all too ready to embrace, as long as we could still dress our school kids like pilgrims and cartoon turkeys. One of the great joys of a holiday is making children look silly.

 

I’m a curious dude, so I did a little searching, trying to find out why it’s on Thursday in the first place. The answer is less satisfying than I had hoped. Some holidays have clear and simple origins: The signing of the Declaration of Independence gave rise to Independence Day; Easter got started because Christians believe Jesus was all like, “Screw you, death,” and rose from the grave, probably with a pretty mean hangover. These are explainable traditions.

 

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that got refined over the years, and the further back in time you look, the fuzzier its origin becomes. It’s like trying to read a road sign when it’s a mere speck of dust on the horizon. In 1941, Congress formalized the holiday, which was based on the Thanksgiving-on-Thursday event that had been observed since 1863, which was started by Lincoln, which was based on a national day of thanks established by the first Continental Congress, which killed the cat that ate the rat that lived in the house that Jack built.

 

In other words, no one truly knows how in blazes we ended up with it. (We’re told tales of Native Americans and pilgrims getting along famously during a harsh winter, but c’mon. It smacks of mythology.) I’d take that history with a grain of salt, though, ‘cause I got it from the website of a horse rescue in Massachusetts.

 

If you were around in the days of horse-drawn carriages and unruly hyena beards, then I guess a Thursday Thanksgiving wouldn’t have been that big a deal. The standard Monday through Friday, nine-to-five workweek had yet to be spawned by the industrial revolution, and life moved at a pace that was stately and slow; there was no such thing as hopping in the Volvo and hightailing it from Portland to Providence, arriving at cousin Lemmy’s bungalow in time for the opening kickoff. With the average person’s social radius set at about a mile and a half, you simply put down your spade and pickax, dressed in your best overalls, and cooked a sumptuous bird for your nine brothers and sisters, most of whom probably lived in the auxiliary barn with a bunch of flatulent cows.

 

Arrangements are a bit more complex these days; life moves at a speedier clip. So speedy, in fact, that it’s often difficult to take a moment and do what the holiday suggests we do in the first place: Take stock of the things for which we feel thankful. That’s hard to do with just the single day off, and doubly so if you’ve got to squeeze in a 500-mile round trip, punctuated by a gargantuan meal that could drag a tweaking meth addict into a peaceful slumber. 

 

Thanksgiving’ll probably be on a Thursday until the end of time, which I guess is fine – it’s nice to have some warm holiday time with family no matter what day of the week it is. But that won’t stop me from dreaming of a Friday holiday, and a three-day weekend dominated by excess and intentionally bad food choices.

 

‘Cause then we’d really have something to be thankful for.