That’s Right Nate

If Thanksgiving is a celebration of the Europeans and the Indians getting together for a party, what better way to celebrate than with Tommy Seebach’s Apache.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holiday. It’s a wonderful time to have the whole family together and follow our own particular traditions. I always like to think of the Pilgrims celebrating that first Thanksgiving nearly 300 years ago at Plymouth Rock. Because Christians were being persecuted in Europe, they had to come to America where they could be free to worship.

Times were very hard for the Pilgrims. They arrived in the winter and they didn’t have a lot of food on their ship to eat. However, somehow they made it through the winter in this strange land called The United States of America. When Fall came, they invited over the strange red men they had met called Indians to partake with them in a feast. At this time there were still too few to conquer the Indians, but that would come eventually. Instead, they used the holiday to look for any weakness in the savages.

Those brave pilgrims and their ancestors would soon go on to conquer not only those Indians, but all the Indians from sea to shining seas. I see that same can do spirit in America today. I hope you and your family have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and enjoy good food and togetherness. The economy is in a slump now and if your Thanksgiving table seems a bit more sparse this year, please remember all of those who have nothing. It’ll make you remember just how delicious your turkey truly is.

Thanksgiving was always a special time for my family when I was growing up.  My father worked very hard to give us an upper middle class lifestyle, but he never wanted us to forget the type of poverty that his father used to pretend he came from.

On Thanksgiving, we didn’t have a fancy feast.  We used to go down to the local kitchen where we would see those much less fortunate than ourselves and we would stand in line to eat their simple fair.   It wasn’t fancy, but you could see that for some of these people it was the only real food they’d get that day and maybe that week.  My dad taught us not to complain as we sat at the folding tables and dined with these poor and simple folk.  My dad would give them colorful nicknames like “Harmonica Bob” or “Crazy Cat Lady” or “Black Comb Head”

At first my sister and I were frightened by the odd people around us.  I remember one year we sat across from a guy who was having a very loud argument with himself.  Instinctively my sister and I recoiled, but my father taught us we didn’t need to be afraid of the man because he was one of God’s children too and it was alright for us to laugh at him.   My dad would even offer his piece of pumpkin pie to the bum who did the best trick for us.  Sometimes we’d get thrown out, but mostly we just sat there enjoying Thanksgiving as a family forgetting how much money we had in our Cape Cod in that exclusive neighborhood where we lived.

We’d be home by 7PM and my parents would tell us we should go right to bed and think about the people we had met.  They’d remind us that if the Democrats got elected we could all be living in a homeless shelter for real and then we’d be asleep by 7:30.  It was only by accident that I later discovered that when my sister and I were asleep, mom and dad would go out to a very nice restaurant and have an elegant Thanksgiving dinner together.

I had wanted to keep this tradition alive with my own daughter Emily, but my ex would have none of it.  She insisted that we have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner like families do.  Though calling us a family was certainly a stretch.  Afterall, in a family one of the spouses isn’t usually getting it on with the neighbor across the street while the other spouse is working late to put food on the table and Lord knows those two ate enough.   Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving from the Peel family such that is to your family.

An 11 year old boy in Seattle by the name of Brendan Foster passed away from Leukemia last Friday.  His dying wish was to help the homeless and people throughout the country have responded with a huge outpouring of generosity.  Across the country truckloads of food and thousands of dollars have been pouring in to help the homeless and I’d just like to express my amazement at this brave little boy.

I’d like to encourage my readers to remember others this Thanksgiving.  However, giving money and food to the less fortunate strikes me as socialism.  It is well meaning, but if everybody gives according to how much they have and receives according to how much they need we’re talking classic Marxist philosophy and frankly that doesn’t work.

I encourage the readers of this blog to donate not to the less fortunate, but to the more fortunate this holiday season.  They will take your donation and with their holiday spirit will then help the poor.  By trickling down holiday spirit this can be a truely joyous time of year for everybody.  If Brendan had lived longer he would have seen the joys of supply side economics himself. Let’s spread the holiday cheer for him.

Think of the tale of Ebeneezer Scrooge who when he found the spirit of Christmas didn’t merely give the Cratchet’s his food, but bought a goose helping his neighborhood butcher and giving an urchin money to deliver it.  That is the kind of supply side Christmas or Thanksgiving spirit we can all get behind.

We must decide if we will remain at the kiddy table with the Indians or move up to the head table with the religious.

When Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal a lot of people were worried that the quality of reporting in the newspaper might go down.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Today there was a great article by Daniel Henninger which places the failure of economy where it clearly belongs – on the secularization of Christmas.  I was a little disappointed that he didn’t mention Thanksgiving, but I’ll get into that later.  As Henninger put it, “A nation whose people can’t say “Merry Christmas” is a nation capable of ruining its own economy.”

i have to admit I’ve felt alone on the front lines of the culture war lately.  Even Bill O’Reilly’s Christmas Reading List has been replaced by a “Holiday” Reading List.  Today, my ex-wife got a letter home from my daughter’s school wishing her family a Happy Turkey Day.   What hope do we have raising a God fearing child when her own school is secularizing Thanksgiving?

“It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions,” states Henninger making a strong case that the cause of the economic downturn is the Northern Atheists who control the banking industry.   Perhaps, it is time to put Southern religious people in charge of our country.

Turkey Day? We must battle back against the liberal agenda.

I was all set to unleash my rage at the atheists attempts to take the Christ out of Christmas.  I feel there are some people very deserving of my righteous indignation.  However, a lot of great men with bigger audiences than myself like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly have been fighting that battle for a few years now.  Instead I will focus on a new threat–The Atheists’ War on Thanksgiving

I can’t believe the number of circulars I am receiving in the mail and the number of signs that I am seeing in stores referring to the holiday of “Turkey Day”.  Even worse is “Black Friday”.   None of these names apply even the slightest but of gratitude to God for our bountiful harvest and the blessings we have received throughout the year.  This is all part of the secular progressive agenda to get Christianity, spirituality, Puritanism, and Pilgrims out of the public square.

The problem is that children will not ask mom and dad what is turkey day?  I mean turkey day is pretty obvious.  However, if they see the holiday referred to as Thanksgiving, they may ask about that.  This is all part of a movement to legalize gay marriage, narcotics, and public urination.

I ask all loyal readers of this blog to avoid all stores that refer to Thanksgiving as Turkey Day or Black Friday.  Let our boycott speak volumes as we get retailers to start putting the thanks back in Thanksgiving.