With almost 12,000 American students each year, Thanksgiving in Florence is at least vaguely recognized. Florentines, and Italians more generally, may consider the holiday only a time in which they see the usually-gawking students glum, two months into their respective programs and realizing that despite their self-convinced invincibility they are, in fact, tethered to their families across the ocean.
Many Italians have heard the term ‘Thanksgiving’ from American TV shows, but hardly any know the assigned annual day, and in the odd case that someone does know the controversial origins they quickly exclaim, “why would you celebrate this?” Thanksgiving is not a meal saluting a harvest: it is, primarily, a revelry dedicated to territorial claim.
Serena Giorgi is the Community Engagement Coordinator at ISI Florence, a Florence-based American study abroad program. She says, “All that we know about it is that people sit around a table with a turkey.” Though, alternative perspectives can be found.
Camilla Turchetti, a woman who grew up between the United States, France and Italy and who lives now in Florence, explains going to college in America and her involvement in Thanksgiving. Camilla describes, with a lightly burning fire in her eyes, the two distinct times she “got to celebrate” the holiday; once, a young memory of a special occasion with a cousin, the other while she studied in America. She says that celebrating the day was “one of [her] favorite memories, looking back at college.” Thanksgiving is, for whatever historical reason, a mark of being an American.
After acknowledging the lesser-known Pequot massacre, Serena speaks about the unanticipated commercialization of Thanksgiving. She says, “There is a garden somewhere where a brutal battle was fought. Then someone went and planted trees over the dead.” There is a place she knows that, once a cemetery, is now a playground.
Though this park is where children skip, if there were at the very least a plaque detailing the history of what was below one could pay respect, learn humanity’s culpabilities. This garden, the transformation into something the opposite of its soil, does have a chance to be sincere—but without the sensitive narrative explained children run undeterred, unquestioning, at risk to grow up and fight each other on the same ground.
The history of the United States offers nothing less than the trail of tears; land claim disputes dismissed, or considered only to be labeled hearsay; off-reservation boarding schools in which indigenous children were dragged from their homes and forced to hear their federally funded motto: “kill the Indian, save the man.” Thanksgiving functions as a tree over this immense cemetery, planted by colonists, watered by children raised in plaqueless parks.
What, then, is Thanksgiving but a step in the process of alchemizing the past? The magical forgetfulness that surrounds this holiday serves as a catalyst for cultural erasure and for history to ultimately repeat itself. Remember this fourth Thursday in November, in communities all over the world: eat your pie, but press your ear to the ground, listen to what is below your carefully cultivated garden.
Abraham Lincoln regarded the occasion a national holiday in 1863 as an attempt to connect the divided post-civil war country. Lincoln’s declaration after the battle of Gettysburg has made the holiday what it is today: eating turkey with family, pretending to have watched American football, wondering why a department store has a famous parade.
The loudest voices on the North American continent tell Thanksgiving’s foundation as a tale of indigenous peoples offering food and welcoming big-black-hat, large-belt, dopey-grinned visitors. The often referenced ‘first feast’ of the United States is said to date back to 1621 when the Plymouth colony had a three-day harvest feast with the Wampanoag tribe, a tribe they would later go to war with. More recently the voices discussing the origin of the feast have been raised and, for Americans, the day has become not a time to sit idly around a turkey, but a time to argue on why the family is sitting together at all.
New England colonies and the Pequot tribe fought a brutal war from 1636 to 1638. During this war, John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts colony at the time, declared a day of thanks-giving after his soldiers massacred over 700 Pequot men, women, and children. The increasingly understood history of the ‘first feast’ leaves nothing more than an image of colonists eating excessively, replenishing their weapon-bearing bodies—any true historical unity coming only from an attempt to seam together the north and south after the civil war. On Thanksgiving Day, slavery and the erasure of the indigenous is exchanged for pumpkin pie and TV-static popping in impartial minds.