What a Southerner Thinks of Thanksgiving Day

Marion Montgomery says this Yankee ‘holiday’ is full of fakery:

THANKSGIVING

A Funeral Chant

There is no family ritual in the blue November morning

No family pig scraped white, steaming in the blue air

No scalding vat choked with sogged bristles

There is no sacrificial pig suspended in the blue November morning, snout down

No tub receiving the pink-blooming, steaming entrails, the steady drip of the dead blood under the grandfather knife

There is no sacramental supper of the first flesh of the sacrificial pig

No hospitable liver steaming on the evening table

Nor white flesh bubbling on the fire to render the essential summer

Now, too, is the clear cellophane season of the year, where impersonally the family executive in slacks

Buys the impersonal pink ham and the rain-clear demijohn of synthetic fat under hospital lamps

--Dry Lightning, Lincoln, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1960, p. 37

--

Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!