Dear Readers, you know I am one of those terrible heathen sorts who doesn’t do anything “right” so it will come as no surprise that I do not celebrate Thanksgiving. I will spend today making bread and soup for dinner and decorating my house for Yule. I will not be rushing out pre-dawn tomorrow to engage in rampant consumerism, either. So, I guess somewhere out in bloggersville, someone will assume I am “making war” on Thanksgiving….maybe as a sort of practice round for my presumed “war on Christmas.” (None of you will believe me, will you, if I say I make love, not war?)

I have read that surveys find Americans entering the holiday season depressed. Gee, really? That is possibly the first GOOD news I have seen in about seven years—it means maybe some of the docile, pious, good sheep are waking the hell up! Cause I just have to tell you, that horrid bumper sticker is coming oh-so-true: If you aren’t depressed, you aren’t paying attention!

Now, lest you think I am just an bitch completely, let me say we did used to do the big feast and glowing table routine when we were still military. We followed the married couple rule and invited all the single guys and gals we could accommodate and ate until ready to pop. We were thankful for each others’ company, for the good meal and the good booze, for football games when we could get them, too. I am one of those sorts who thinks ANY good excuse to socialize and adore friends and family is a pretty good one. I could get behind the Thanksgiving holiday on that basis without reservation. But I don’t need to, you see, my own personal tradition provides me a like holiday earlier in the year. I like to use “your” Thanksgiving holiday to drive someplace usually crowded—my favorite hiking place, my favorite beach at the ocean. Cause, I am an anti-social, anti-crowd sort of person. Also, with a few diluted drops of Comanche blood in my system, it grates a bit to “celebrate” the beginning of the end for America’s indigenous peoples—as terribly politically correct as that sounds. And for personal history, from my childhood, I have to say this was the opening act of month long holiday hell—so I am perfectly happy with skipping it.

I often hear Thanksgiving lauded as the non-commercialized holiday. Really? Do you know how much money is spent on the “feast” and the travel alone? And then, of course, the next day (contemplation of which leaves me cowering beneath my bed) is supposed to be the consumer marathon event of the year. Is this really how anyone “gives thanks”? Honestly? So, maybe I AM making war on that precise sort of “thanksgiving” after all? I think being thankful for something should somehow entail caring how we got it, how we keep it, and what we do with it.

I mourn internally on this day for how we “got” this nation. I weep and rant about how our current administration seems bent on “keeping” it, and I wonder what we are doing not only to our nation, but our world. And yes, I am depressed going into the mad season ahead because I AM paying attention. My top of the lists reasons for depression, even as I decorate my house to celebrate a physical and symbolic “return of light” winter’s solstice?

* The continual war and costs human and financial, not to mention environmental.

* The increased fascist tendencies IN America—including more violent police control instead of any “protect and serve’ behavior on their part or training.

* Wondering how families will pay for heat at $100 a barrel for oil, especially if the price might be demanded in more stable Euro currency.

* Worry over when my youngest son will go to Iraq or Afghanistan.

* Worry about the American economy over all; I find the stock market no big comfort—how the richest Americans are doing doesnt’ much speak to me of the average minimum wage couples trying to balance rent/food/fuel/meds.

*Fear of how the Religious Right is trying to re-shape America into the sort of theocratic nightmare that they decry in the Mideast. What? It is only wrong if Moslems do it; a Christian theocracy would be inherently better? Not….so not; they had that, remember? It was called the Dark Ages.

* Fear that America’s media has stopped being a watchdog and become a lapdog of America’s new masters—the corporations.

* Fear that the Constitution really will be toliet paper, and that the Bill of Rights has already been flushed completely away.

* Fear that Americans have become so trained to instant gratification and sound bite logic that they are literally incapable of paying enough attention to stop the slide into a complete falsification of what our Founding Fathers envisioned.

* Fear that I will be walking that Labyrinth with lists of Americans who will never sit at a Thanksgiving table again…..for the rest of my life. Selfish, and self-pitying…but hey, honesty is a bargain today.

Those of you who gather family and make joy–Happy Thanksgiving. Please give a thought to the families rent and torn by this war, and ask even in the dark quiet of your hearts, what are we really fighting for that is worth all the prices we are and will continue to pay? Are we leaving those children at the table anything to be thankful for in the decades ahead?

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