MUSIC TO MY EARS: Public Thanks In The Marketplace"My needs are small/I buy them all/At the 5- and 10-cent store/I've got plenty to be thankful for." So sings Bing Crosby on a vinyl test pressing of Irving Berlin's "Plenty To Be Thankful For," which the actor/singer places on a phonograph and listens to alone while seated in his snowbound Connecticut lodge, picking forlornly at a turkey dinner, in a scene from the 1942 film "Holiday Inn." Crosby's character, Jim Hardy, is a crooner who let the girl and his self-respect get away-although he retrieves both by the last reel of the movie musical about counting one's annual blessings. In real life, such somber stock-taking often comes too late. Thus, the enduring popularity of the cautionary Hollywood classic and its social subtext: the art of appreciation. Since ancient times, the bounty of the marketplace and the people who congregate there have been seasonal metaphors for thankful and conciliatory gestures. Surprisingly, there are few songs specific to Thanksgiving, a fact lingering in the back of Don Henley's mind when he wrote "My Thanksgiving" for his latest solo album, "Inside Job." "Other than the one from 'Holiday Inn,' I can't think of any," says Henley. "There's probably a lot of folk music and Celtic music about the harvest, and my friend Katey Sagal made an album ["Well . . .," Virgin, 1994] with a wonderful song on it called 'Can't Hurry The Harvest,' but I wrote 'My Thanksgiving' around this time of year. I do my best work in autumn," he notes, adding with a laugh, "I'm a 'fall' guy. "The song is about appreciation," Henley continues. "It's among my favorite songs on the album, and I still feel the same way as I did when I wrote it." As Henley observes in the chorus: "For every moment of joy/For every hour of fear/For every winding road that brought me here/For every breath, for every day of living/This is my Thanksgiving." The historical antecedents for these secular and religious occasions are many, with their confusions of virtue and commerce at least medieval in origin-as when pious travelers to shrines were catered to (or connived by) roadside vendors. The harvest marketplace was the symbolic site to express gratitude for civic health and well-being or to show, says Henley, "public forgiveness, as they do in the Jewish tradition," and proclaim the healing of breaches. Among the harvest festivals of the medieval world that either tolerated or encouraged merchantry were autumn's eight-day Jewish thanksgiving of Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles, to recall the Israelites' 40-year sojourn in the wilderness. And, while not included with the 12 great liturgical feasts of the Middle Ages (500-1500 A.D.) like Easter and Christmas, there was the harvest-time Christian feast of Michaelmas, during which a fatted goose was eaten in homage to St. Michael the Archangel. In all cases the celebrations were designed to relax local canons of order but also reaffirm the merits of self-control and tolerance between feast days. And as civilization grew more stressful, the wisdom of such occasions only grew more evident. English historian E.P. Thompson notes in his book "Customs In Common" (New Press, 1993) that "few folk rituals survived with such vigor to the end of the 18th century as all the paraphernalia of the harvest-home, with its charms and suppers, its fairs and festivals. Even in manufacturing areas, the year still turned to the rhythm of the seasons." In the U.S., if the Puritans of the 1600s argued for fasting on Thanksgiving, their conservative will was soon eclipsed by hungry pilgrims' harvest banquets in the New World-as well as the business transactions that underlaid them. Centuries later, a Feb. 10, 1900, edition of the Dry Goods Chronicle trade journal cited the "great festivals of the year," even those that mark "an event which is sacred to many," as dates that should "also be made an occasion for legitimate merchandising." The feast of Sukkot had been so potently transplanted to Manhattan's Lower East Side by 1906 that a reporter for The New York Independent wrote about how "at these holy days the number of carts increases marvelously . . . Every conceivable plan is adopted to display goods." The intent of these heavily marketed events was not just to satisfy consumer urges, however, but also to meet the perceived need for unifying public rites in a vast new republic with too many provincial instincts. Most U.S. holidays in the 18th and 19th centuries remained regional in their preoccupations-like Evacuation Day in New York on Nov. 25, which was long celebrated to remember the 1783 withdrawal of British troops from its precincts during the Revolutionary War. Such parochial nonreligious feast days would be replaced in the 20th century with national observances in which the entire populace could find common cause. But the deeper meanings of the original harvest marketplace and its role as a rallying point have suffered as the root themes of our holidays have withered. Back in 1766, the sheriff of Gloucestershire wrote that those thronging to his English town's market square during the festival year were responsible for diverse actions, "some of wantonness and excess-and in other instances some acts of courage, prudence, justice, and a consistency towards that which they profess to obtain." Ideally, such individualism would characterize the holiday marketplace of 2000. Instead, the outlook often proclaimed is less than compassionate: "I feel fine, so what's your problem?" Upholding human dignity is not a quaint, calendar-linked inconvenience but rather an individual public responsibility from which there is no seasonal recess. "I think that Thanksgiving will become more meaningful as time goes on," says Henley, "because Christmas has become so chaotic and commercialized and stressful that people gravitate to the quieter and more reflective time of Thanksgiving. Cultures that wrap themselves in self-righteousness and think they're the center of the universe tend to topple eventually. The same is true for industries and corporations. Thanksgiving is about family and getting together, and it's part of the aging process to become more grateful for each day. A lot of my friends, people I graduated from high school with, and even people two and three years younger than me, are starting to die-heart attacks at age 50, brain tumors at 53. My mother, who is 84 and battling breast cancer, says that she's just grateful to wake up every morning, that she's still here." Empathy abhors an emotional vacuum, and true art asks its audience to feel beyond themselves, particularly on feast days. As my 8-year-old son, Alexander, once countered when a friend described food as fuel for people, "Oh, no. Love is fuel for people." I am thankful in November 2000 for my own child's words.
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