The Productive Meaning of Thanksgiving

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Enjoy the food, your friends and family, and celebrate productive achievement!

Ed Hudgins

"The Productive Meaning of Thanksgiving."

Here is that charming little work.

The Productive Meaning of Thanksgiving

by Ed Hudgins

November 23, 2005 -- American homes on the fourth Thursday in November will waft with more than the aroma of turkey and pumpkin pie. Also in the air will be the joy at the start of the holiday season running from Thanksgiving to Christmas through New Years. As temperatures turn cold outdoors, we'll warm ourselves inside and out with gatherings of friends and family, festivities, parties and presents.

Inevitably this season also gives rise to queries about the "true meaning" of this or that holiday, usually with complaints about the superficiality of the season. To these critics I say, "Stop being an ugly hair in the sweet potato casserole!"

Let's review just a few of the things that people traditionally do during the month starting with turkey-time. To begin with, we travel, facing lots of crowded roads, airports, bus terminals and train stations. Yes, it's a hassle, but isn't it great that if we live on the Atlantic seaboard we can fly to see family on the Pacific coast in under six hours? Several centuries ago it took weeks to go from Massachusetts to Georgia, the original extent of the country, and months to go west to find the Promised Land, if you survived the journey. Separated families usually remained separated.

And you were lucky to have family members at all; life expectancy in the time of the Pilgrims was under forty. Infant morality was extremely high. Today most Americans can be expected to live to their late seventies. Modern medicine has worked wonders.

The center of Thanksgiving Day is a great feast. We can understand why. The Pilgrims were so pleased that they hadn't starved to death following their arrival in 1620 that even that often dour lot saw it as an occasion for a party. Hunger and the threat if not reality of starvation were the rule through much of human history.

Remember, less than a year after the founding of the Jamestown settlement in 1607, only 46 of the 104 original colonists were left alive, most having perished for lack of food. No wonder this earlier settlement in North America did not inspire a holiday!

Of course, their real problem was political. The company that sponsored Jamestown made provisions for settlers to be fed from a common store. There was no incentive to be productive. But communism did not work. Gentlemen settlers spent their time hunting for gold -- they found none. John Smith later instituted a new rule: those who do not work shall not eat. That produced an incentive to produce food.

In free-market America today we have so much food at such a low cost that obesity rather than emaciation is a health problem.

Which brings us to what we do the day after Thanksgiving and the month that follows: We shop! We crowd the malls to buy gifts for others -- and usually a little something for ourselves! Yes, some people complain about commercialized holidays but the whole notion of fall harvest feasts throughout human history was to celebrate production. How wonderful that we can make our lives comfortable with attractive clothes and fun toys, consumer electronics and interesting books, movies and music, fine furniture and furnishings, to say nothing of tasty treats! And we can share our regard for those significant individuals in our lives with gifts of same.

As to the "deeper" meaning of the holidays, that is found in the travel, long-lived family members, food and stores full of goods. The deeper meaning is that we have the capacity to produce such wealth and that we live in a country that affords us our right to exercise the virtue of productivity and to reap its rewards.

So let's celebrate wealth and the power in us to produce it; let's welcome this most wonderful time of the year and partake without guilt of the bounty we each have earned.

Here is the rest for the record.

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[Guyau]

.

The world begins at a kitchen table.

. . .

It is here that children are given

instructions on what it means to be human.

We make men at it, we make women.

. . .

. . . of the last sweet bite.

—Joy Harjo

[BaalChatzaf]

.

The world begins at a kitchen table.

. . .

It is here that children are given

instructions on what it means to be human.

We make men at it, we make women.

. . .

. . . of the last sweet bite.

—Joy Harjo

The family that chows down together amounts to something.

Breaking bread with the kin strengthens the bonds.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Selene]

Stephen and Michael:

Thank you so much for your posts on this special day.

As individuals, we celebrate a common place on this day.

I am proud to know all of you, and, wish you my best thoughts on this special day wherein we share our common desires for peace, health and the fulfillment of our passions.

A...

[BaalChatzaf]

The aboriginal folk of what is now New England came to regret their hospitality.

No good deed shall go unpunished.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[syrakusos]

Thank you for the Hudgins article. I collect these Objectivist essays on Thanksgiving as the Producer's Holiday.

Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday. In spite of its religious form (giving thanks to God for a good harvest), its essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers’ holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. -- “Cashing in on Hunger,” The Ayn Rand Letter, III, 23, 1

Thanksgiving celebrates man's ability to produce. The cornucopia filled with exotic flowers and delicious fruits, the savory turkey with aromatic trimmings, the mouth-watering pies, the colorful decorations -- it's all a testament to the creation of wealth. -- "Thanksgiving: The Producer's Holiday," Sunday, November 12, 2000, By: Gary Hull, Ph.D. The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.

I posted a few greetings over on RoR.

Here and now let me say that ObjectivistLiving is one of the things for which I am grateful. It's a nice bit of work and pleasant company all the way around, like a large and everlasting Thanksgiving Dinner with all the cousins, in-laws, and friends. I often eat while online here. In fact, I think I hear leftovers calling me even now...

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here and now let me say that ObjectivistLiving is one of the things for which I am grateful. It's a nice bit of work and pleasant company all the way around, like a large and everlasting Thanksgiving Dinner with all the cousins, in-laws, and friends. I often eat while online here. In fact, I think I hear leftovers calling me even now...

Michael,

What a nice thought expressed in such a charming manner.

Thank you.

Michael

[caroljane]

Howcome you all are doing this a month late? Don't you know this is Grey Cup weekend?

I share the sentiments of gratitude for OL, but sometimes you can be a bunch of turkeys.