CALL AND RESPONSE

October 2003

by Barry Stagg

Happy Thanksgiving: I'll Go On

This is a quick little story to touch October and the Thanksgiving season. There never is much doubt in my mind that the art of Thanksgiving for us, as Newfoundlanders, is in accepting the true end of our northern summer and the onset of the long season where we eat what we have saved from the growing and catching and hunting. That is the traditional outlook on the October holiday that marks the run into winter and Christmas and the slush of January.

The so-called modern age brings with it a retail haze that obscures the simple realism of a Sunday in October set aside for honouring the fact that we are all well and shaping up for the hard push through the cold bare months ahead. We are either well or as well as can be expected but we push on in the collective expression of Samuel Beckett's profound fatalist aphorism: "I can't go on. I'll go on."

Modernity is often a cruel foe to holiday festivals as the clever and the fashionable work in the same harness of benighted nihilism to ridicule such rituals that give credit and tribute to the past and our ancestors. Our Western democracies are made of sufficiently stern stuff that fashion will not ruin them. However, care and conscious awareness of the need to celebrate and honour our venerable way of life- our civilization- is vital to maintaining the strength and integrated fibre of the way we go on. And, mark our words, we do go on, in spite of fashion and in particular defiance of any foul attempts to destroy our spirit- September 11, 2001 being a prime and vivid example of such failed barbarity.

Happy Thanksgiving.


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