CALIFORNIA THANKFUL
Published November 23, 2002

For as long as I can remember, Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday. For starters, making it always fall on a Thursday has to place it in the top two. Unless you've just been given three days to live, it's hard to fault a four-day weekend.

Then there's how understated the celebration is. You don't have any costumes to make of pumkins to carve. No cards to send or gifts to give, no fireworks or rooms full of lunatics counting down to midnight. All that's expected of you on Thanksgiving is to:
a) Take some time to think about everything in your life that's good.
and then:
b). Just say thanks.

I also like that it's not one of those holidays where you have to go to church and be somber. Not that there's anything wrong with going to church and being somber, but there's also nothing wrong with a holiday where the basic idea is to get together with some savages and eat too much.

Which brings me neatly to Thanksgiving's biggest potential pitfall: the family gathering. No one's family is perfect, and most can't even agree on exactly whose fault that really is. But I've found that if I take a moment just before entering the fray to remind myself that you never know when you're going to need a bone marrow transplant, then suddenly he's no longer just my wierd Uncle Max, he matching tissue. It doesn't take all the edge off, but it helps.

Still, to this day my absolute favorite thing about Thanksgiving has to be the story behind it. After unimaginable hardships, facing a harsh winter and an uncertain future, the first non-native Americans decide to give thanks. Not just to their God and to each other, but also to the "other", those native Americans who greeted them as brothers.

For some, the subsequent three centuries' worth of murderous duplicity towards these same people has rendered Thanksgiving nothing more than the most expensive dinner invitation in history. Others might suggest that America didn't become the richest and most powerful nation on earth by sharing.

But for all the missteps and excesses of the past and the present, if California is any indication (and it usually is) then America's headed back to the future of that first all-inclusive Thanksgiving. A big part of our exceptionalism as Californians now stems from the amazing diversity of our state, which recently became the first state in the union to have no majority race. It's almost as if our differences have, in the end, become what unites us. With all groups in the minority, the practice of tolerance is now enlightened self-interest, and largely unconscious. I can't think of a more valuable template for our times, which is why this Thursday I'm planning to take a little time just to be thankful for the dreams that still are California.

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