Turkeys have been active in our neighborhood. A whole flock of them – 14 at the last count – have been marching through backyards and parading down the middle of the street. They don’t seem to have any worries about the future, even though Thanksgiving is not a good time for turkeys. The heartwarming story about Indians and turkeys in 1621 has entered our Thanksgiving mythology forever, whether the turkeys like it or not.
However, in spite of Norman Rockwell’s iconic painting, which puts the turkey front and center, Thanksgiving is quintessentially a family festival, and families are complicated. The role of the turkey is simple by comparison.
Almost everyone agrees that family is a good thing. “Family values” has become an all-purpose term of moral approval even though, if you look at it globally, “family values” around the world embrace everything from blood feuds and honor killing to cannibalism. Even here in the United States, the term “Family Values” is so elastic as to be all but meaningless, which is why politicians love it so much.
The family itself is a highly flexible, not to say a fluid institution. In some cultures, it may include multiple wives and hundreds or even thousands of remote relatives. In others, like ours, it may be just two or three people living together. Yet every nation and culture has a family system of some kind. We need it as a refuge from the six billion other people in the world who don’t know or care anything about us. The family, by contrast, may know too much about us, but It does offer some kind of answer, although not always a welcome one, to the question, “Who am I?”
If our family is small, nonexistent, or unsatisfactory, we can expand it by adding dogs, cats, or other creatures. Some of the most valued members of our family are covered in fur. Others adopt celebrities into their family or have a familial relationship with sports teams, work colleagues, friends or congregations, lodges, or drinking buddies. Only the familiar faces, voices, and opinions of the family, whoever they are, can provide real comfort and security. That’s what the word “familiar” means.
Our family is always the hardest to understand because it’s so close that it blurs—and it is blurred quite deliberately. When I was young, I was intensely curious about our family, but I was always told, “Ask no questions, and you’ll hear no lies.” But I kept on asking questions and heard plenty of lies, which were always interesting and informative.
Every family has secrets, and every family is, in a sense, invisible to outsiders, a locked room mystery, a conspiracy of silence. Family reunions are stressful simply because they may know your secrets, and (if you have done your research) you may know theirs. It’s a delicate balance, which can be easily upset by political passions, multiple marriage confusions, gender identity complications, and thoughtless DNA testing, any one of which may blow the myth of the family sky high.
The role of the turkey is to proclaim a truce, as it did in 1621. This is not the time for sensational family revelations. This is the week when we must accept them as they seem to be and hope they will do the same for us.
