Hello and happy Saturday. I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving. Things were a little quiet in the Ohio bureau this year. Our out-of-town family did not make it in for our normal weekend of shenanigans, and we hit one of those bittersweet milestones that will become all too common too soon: Our oldest son spent the holiday with his future in-laws in the opposite corner of the state. I did manage to cut back on the big meal a bit, but happily we still had plenty of leftovers. I say “happily” because, to me, the leftovers are what make the holiday—waking up with a cup of coffee and banana pudding for breakfast, then later piling some cold turkey and a dab of mayo on a plate to nibble on for lunch.
In that vein, I hope you’re up for some leftovers, too. We published a couple of great Thanksgiving-related pieces you might have missed while traveling, preparing for guests, or enjoying your feast.
Kevin D. Williamson weaves together the Pilgrims’ perilous journey to the New World, remembrances of his own childhood, and reflections on how fatherhood has changed him in a long essay about faith and gratitude.
The center of the world is in the monastery, in the cathedral, in the tabernacle, at the corner of 73rd and Park Avenue, high on the Llano Estacado, high in the Himalayas or here in these mountains, cold today and lightly sugared with snow—the center of the world is where we find it. The cathedral is where we find it—where we build it, and so is the tabernacle. That mystical center is the place we pilgrims are going, wherever that happens to be, because we bring it with us only to find that it was already there. It is “the cross that raiseth me.” It is the cross we carry, and the pilgrim ship that carries us across the dark waters, it is the shore we land on, and all of us pilgrims are standing on holy ground because holy ground is the only ground there is to stand on, sanctified and consecrated by the touch of its Creator at the moment of its creation. And who or what could deprive creation of its holiness? “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” Gratitude is, in a sense, the spiritual discipline of trying to align ourselves with God’s own stated point of view on the matter. But we are small and vulnerable, easily wounded, often resentful, and—the point, as I experience it, keeps getting sharper—not made for this world. To try to take up God’s point of view is not an easy thing. Bitterness is easy. Indifference takes more work, but I have never shied away from labors of that kind.
We all learned in elementary school about the Pilgrims and the very first Thanksgiving in 1621, about how the survivors of the journey across the Atlantic and a very hard first winter gathered with the Wampanoag to celebrate their first successful harvest. But it would be more than 200 years before thanksgiving feasts would become Thanksgiving. We also learned in elementary school that President Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation in 1863 declaring a national day of thanksgiving. We rarely learn about the woman who gave Lincoln the idea.
In the latest piece from our Next 250 series looking back at key events in American history ahead of the coming semiquincentennial, LuElla D’Amico tells the story of Sarah Josepha Hale, the woman who lobbied Lincoln to turn a frequent but irregular New England tradition into a national holiday.
Hale was a young widow with five children when she took up writing, publishing the novel Northwood in 1827 and taking over Godey’s Lady’s Book—a magazine full of “housekeeping columns, beauty advice, sewing patterns, child-rearing philosophy, moral essays, recipes, religious tracts, musical compositions, short stories, and serialized novels”—in 1837. As D’Amico writes, “Think a blend of Anna Wintour’s editorial power with a dash of Oprah’s cultural reach. She wasn’t just editing a magazine; she was curating American taste.” Hale was nothing if not determined. She wrote to four presidents in her push to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, and all of them ignored her. Then she wrote to Lincoln.
In the middle of brutal civil strife, Lincoln took up Hale’s idea that gratitude to God and for each other could be a form of national repair.
How often do we talk about that at Thanksgiving? Not just the abundance on our plates, but the purpose of the day itself: to give thanks to God, to love each other better, to remember the vulnerable, to soften our own hearts. We tell the Pilgrims’ story every year, but the truth is that while their harvest celebration left us an origin myth, it was the Civil War—and Hale’s decades-long campaign—that re-forged Thanksgiving into the annual ritual of gratitude we know today. A practice we needed then, and perhaps need again.
Before Hale’s triumph, America had only one truly national celebration—the Fourth of July. Long before Congress made it a federal holiday in 1870, Independence Day was marked with parades, cannons, fireworks, and patriotic speeches. It was a holiday created to celebrate what made us free—not what held us together.
Hale wanted something different—not in opposition to the Fourth of July, but in addition to it. She believed the nation needed a day centered not on military victory, but on home, gratitude, and shared belonging. Again, this is why she doesn’t fit neatly into our ideological bins. She championed national unity, yet she believed that domestic life—largely women’s work in the 19th century—could mold a republic just as importantly as more public-facing work. If the Fourth of July taught independence, Hale believed Thanksgiving could teach interdependence: that a nation is sustained not only by the freedoms we fight for, but by the commitments we keep to one another around a shared table.
Here at The Dispatch we’re grateful for all of you, since you make it possible for us to do our work. Thank you, and have a great and restful weekend.
Steve Farina spends many mornings dipping a paddle in the Alouette River. He’s alone on the water, and it’s here, as herons circle for fish and morning haze scrapes the Golden Ears mountain, that he does the quiet, internal accounting of life. Kayaking’s become a sacred ritual for him, a way to decompress after three decades of firefighting in British Columbia. “I’m watching the sunrise on the river and I just needed …” he says, choking up. “I’ll be honest with you; I had a few cries on the river. I’m just reliving it, like g-dd-mn.” Firefighters love their “salty old captains,” the rough-around-the-edges types. It’s a culture that fosters emotional detachment, which, Farina believes, is essential when properly balanced. “You gotta be strong, you gotta show up,” he says of the mindset. “If you are going to a call and it’s someone’s worst day, you have to be operational, you have to be stoic.”Before he discovered kayaking, he coped with the stress like many other guys do: by bottling up his feelings. He filled up his “backpack,” as he calls it, with a lifetime’s worth of traumatic calls without ever taking it off. It got to the point where he became his “own worst enemy”—the “helper who was helping everyone else and just stuffing my sh-t down.”
Since the drone war intensified, getting to a position has become more dangerous than staying in one. Russian drones now target Ukrainian logistics up to 12 miles behind the front. Getting within 2 miles of the contact line in a vehicle is close to suicide. Only drone and artillery positions still get resupplied by car. For the rest, the soldiers on “line zero” walk in on foot, supplied by heavy cargo drones. Aladdin is from Vinnytsia. His commander, Lev, 45, round-faced and quick to smile, claps him on the shoulder and turns to me, reassuringly. “He’s the best driver in the unit. With him, you feel like you’re flying on a magic carpet.” Aladdin, in his early 20s, smiles. “Come on, he’s exaggerating.” For now, he is still waiting for his vehicle. The Ukrainian army is short of everything—shells, jets, drones. Cars have become scarce, too, with life spans measured in months or even days. The few that survive are Mad Max machines, kept running by welding and prayer.
I have every confidence that Donald Trump has never read a word of Nietzsche. But I don’t think we have ever seen a more Nietzschean figure in public life. Trump lives by Nietzsche’s dictum that, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” He uses Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment more effectively than anybody on the left. Not to get too deep in the weeds, but this is the idea that you take what society thinks is good and noble and turn it on its head. This was Nietzsche’s great indictment of Pauline Christianity—it made boldness, strength, and other knightly virtues into vices, and it elevated, in his telling, meekness to a virtue. Trump denounced American exceptionalism as a fraud. He said his favorite biblical passage was “an eye for an eye.” He declared at Charlie Kirk’s funeral—after Kirk’s wife bravely and virtuously forgave her husband’s killer—that he did not believe in forgiveness. And yet, I am sure millions of Trump fans still think Trump is a good Christian, simply because they want to believe it. I could, as you know, go on. But my point isn’t about Trump, it’s about the supposed conservatives who were seduced by this and celebrated it. As with Chesterton, I believe dogma is good. When something becomes dogma, it becomes settled. I think accumulating settled questions is how civilization advances. The only way we can live atop a shining city on a hill is by making that hill out of layers of dogma and settled questions. We don’t dig them up in the name of “just asking questions” or in service to some conspiracy theory about the past—or the present.
