Thanksgiving – a holiday diminished?

Thanksgiving Day! Our national festival where we’re supposed to be thankful for what we have, and can gorge ourselves to gluttony with promises that we’ll exercise or diet of the excess poundage in coming weeks.

Wishing my brother and I could be together again

I’m never quite sure what to make of this date, and not because I’m someone feeling the need to identify with the saga of native peoples to this continent having their land stolen from them by the white man!

PERSONALLY, A PART of me wants to take a can of cranberry sauce and shove it down their whiny throats when they start spewing out this tale. Then again, I say a can of cranberry sauce and not a turkey leg because I despise cranberry sauce (whether canned or made fresh) and because, personally, the leg is my favorite part of the bird.

I often hear of people for whom Christmas or Easter or other holidays get diminished for them because of the loss of someone in proximity to the so-called festive day.

For me, that has become Thanksgiving during the past seven years.

My mother, Jenny, died in early November 2010. I still remember the last time I heard her voice – my brother (also since departed) had taken her to a hospital because she wasn’t feeling well and he called me via telephone to tell me they were actually sending her home.

DURING THAT PHONE call, I could hear my mother’s voice in the background almost haranguing him with a list of stores she had to visit and tasks she would have to do in order to prepare for a Thanksgiving Day meal with my brother and I.

For all I know, her last thoughts may well have been of all the work she would have had to do for the upcoming holiday. Because on the car ride home, she suddenly lost consciousness (her final words, I’m told, were “I’m going to pass out”).

She wound up never regaining consciousness, and was pronounced dead a couple of hours later.

This Munsters mutant almost seems appetizing

Since then, Thanksgiving has become a holiday I have spent with my step-mother’s family – specifically, her sister lives in the Beverly neighborhood, and I expect to convene there with my father and others as we try to express what we’re thankful for.

ACTUALLY, THINGS USED to be worse on Thanksgiving. Because not only would I have to juggle both of those events on the actual Thursday, my father would always insist on having a post-Thanksgiving meal on the following Saturday.

Which he said was necessary so we could have all of our own personal favorite dishes – although I mostly remember them as dishes he liked that nobody else was particularly fond of.

The point being that in past years, these next few days would have been an edible orgy of heavy, fattening foods. I most assuredly would have felt more stuffed than the turkey by the time the weekend was over.

But perhaps it’s evidence my father is getting up there in years – even he doesn’t seem to want all the hassle of a post-Thanksgiving meal.

NOT THAT I’M complaining. It actually feels like a relief not to have to ration out how much I eat at each stop so that I don’t make myself ill from over-eating.

How many people really identify with this version of the Thanksgiving tale

I’ll be able to enjoy the meal, which my step-mother’s brother-in-law will prepare. And with the exception of one year when his turkey came out incredibly dry, his past experiences are such that I’m expecting to enjoy myself in a culinary sense.

Although I have to make a confession – there’s a part of me that wouldn’t mind enduring a bit of overeating if it meant I could have a few more moments with my mother.

On this day, more than most others, I find myself missing my mom.

  -30-

Will Thanksgiving meal someday come at shopping mall food court?

My brother, Chris, and I plan to spend this holiday Thursday visiting our father and step-mother, who plan to visit her sister who lives in the Beverly neighborhood.


There will be assorted family and friends present – a typical-enough Thanksgiving holiday experience, I suppose.

YET THE PART that may make it the typical experience is the fact that I have been told my step-brother won’t be on hand to share in a turkey dinner. His absence is due to the newest trend of this day – he’s going to be shopping.

He wants to take advantage of all those sales specially scheduled for Thursday – the day before Black Friday.

Before anyone presumes I’m about to bad-mouth a family member, I’m not. For it seems that what really is happening is that all this holiday shopping is becoming more and more the norm for our society.

I’m wondering how long it will be before it is the people who insist on gathering together for a meal who will be considered the aberration on “Thanksgiving” day.

SO MUCH FOR the federal holiday that Abraham Lincoln approved as a day of thanks, based off the imagery of the pilgrims who settled in Massachusetts back in 1620.

Now, it’s a day to pay homage to the “god” that is Sam Walton, offering up all kinds of gadgets at his Wal-mart stores located everywhere in the country.

Now anybody who has read my commentary in the past knows I don’t think much of this trend. To me, the crowds that gather for the ritual big shopping days connected to the winter holidays are just too annoying to put up with.

I’ll be looking for the lulls in activity (as few and miniscule as they will be) to try to pick out gifts for the upcoming Hanukkah and Christmas holidays (I know people who celebrate each).

BUT NOT EVERYBODY feels the same. I have heard my sister-in-law go on and on about the joys of finding a special holiday price by being willing to put up with those same crowds that annoy me.

So the fact that many businesses are not waiting until early Friday to begin the holiday season (some stores literally are going to be open for the bulk of Thursday) made it so that I wasn’t surprised to learn my step-brother and his family will be amongst those shoppers.

My sympathy goes to the people who have to work at places like Best Buy, Target, Sears, Toys ‘r’ Us and other major chains who have decided to be open for business on Thursday. Any semblance of a ‘day off’ gets flushed away to help enhance the financial bottom line.

The shopping mentality even exists in Ferguson, Mo., the St. Louis suburb that has had some outbursts and vandalism in the wake of a local police officer being absolved of criminal responsibility in the shooting death of a black man.

THE ACTIVISTS WHO have been leading protests that have turned into some looting have threatened a more peaceful, but also more threatening to the financial bottom line, action – a boycott of any holiday shopping during the upcoming weekend.

Considering that retail operations go on about how this weekend is key to their level of profitability for the year, NOT shopping is harmful.

So maybe I can claim to be a revolutionary, of sorts, by not shopping Thursday or Friday. Although it would be an exaggeration of great significance. Maybe I’m just too lazy to trek out to the crowded stores and would rather gather with family for a communal meal.

As for my step-brother, I don’t know if he’ll ever read this. But since I likely won’t see him Thursday, I’ll just have to use this commentary to wish him a “Happy Thanksgiving,” and hope he found some special price that made the way worthwhile for him.

  -30-

Was it Thanksgiving? Or merely the first official shopping day of X-mas?

I don’t much care for what the Thanksgiving holiday has become.

Christmas on State Street ...

Because as much as I’m sure some people are going to respond to me by saying it was a chance to spend time with family while enjoying an elegant, overly-fancy meal together, I can’t help but sense that some people thought of it as merely the food they ate to give them sustenance before they went shopping.

YES, I REALLY believe that the Thanksgiving holiday is at risk of being overtaken by all the holiday shopping gimmicks meant to get people into the stores so that they will spend more money than they had planned to.

I don’t mean to be a downer. But I was always the reporter-type person whose least favorite work day was the day after Thanksgiving.

I have many memories of people engaging in ridiculous behavior because they thought the day after Thanksgiving was when they were supposed to go shopping for all those Christmas-related presents. Interviewing the guy who was selling velvet paintings of Elvis Presley from a van parked along Wabash Avenue near Randolph Street is probably the most garish.

But my point being I never comprehended the people who felt the need to rush into the holiday shopping mess. It makes the process of picking out gifts all the more hectic. Why turn it into a hassle?

FRIDAY WAS ALWAYS the day I went out of my way to avoid anything resembling a shopping mall or other place where retail was being performed. A part of me will even be reluctant to set foot in a supermarket on that day.

But now, with the trend of stores opening up on Thursday, it seems that I have a pair of days in which I will need to be careful – less I get sucked into the madness of crowds of people who don’t really have a clue what they want, but are looking to pick out things that will make them appear not to be cheap.

... has a certain character, regardless of when ...

Even though, in reality, they’re probably counting every penny they have (and some they really don’t have) all so they can be tightwads without looking the part.

It’s not so much that I don’t like crowds. I just don’t care for the vibe that comes from these people who feel that holiday shopping is a mission.

IT MAKES THEM all too susceptible to the deals that aren’t all that special. It is a scene I’d just as soon avoid. Even if that makes it seem as though I’m spouting a “Bah, Humbug!” or two.

... it occurs. Photos by Chuckman Chicago Nostalgia

In fact, if there’s anything about this particular holiday season that catches my attention, it’s the fact that Hanukkah is coming earlier than usual this year – and won’t coincide with Thanksgiving again for another 77,000 years or so.

Friday will be the third night (out of eight) of that Jewish holiday, and it is going to be long complete by the time the Christmas madness gets underway.

In my case, my step-mother is Jewish, and our Thanksgiving meal Thursday included a lighting of the candles at sundown that mark each day of the holiday. For some people, the concept of “Thanksgivikkah” was the reality.

ALTHOUGH FOR US, we’ve actually had enough family conflicts in schedules that the decision was made to postpone Hanukkah until mid-December.

So I have a couple of weeks to fret over finding the perfect presents for my Jewish nephews and nieces. Whom I care for too much to snub outright.

Which means I’ll have to wind up plunging myself into the retail madness of this holiday season.

My warning to you now; get out of my way, unless you want my elbow in your ribs!!!

  -30-

How many people will turn out for Maggie Daley’s Sunday service?

I offer my condolences to the Daley family. And I don’t mean just the former mayor himself.

For while we all knew that Maggie Daley’s health was in decline and newsrooms everywhere were aware that it was time to get their pre-written obituaries of Chicago’s former first lady prepared for publication, it still was a blow for her to die on Thursday.

WHICH FOR THE rest of us was the day that we all stuffed our faces with too much heavy food and sat on our duffs watching too much out-of-town football for anyone’s benefit.

It was Thanksgiving. A holiday we’re supposed to celebrate.

Yet for the Daleys, Thanksgiving will now forevermore be the day they lost their wife/mother/aunt/etc.

That applies even though Thanksgiving does not fall on the same date each year.

SO NEXT YEAR’S Thanksgiving will not literally be the one-year marking point of the date of her death. But I’m sure the holiday itself will forevermore carry a bit of a taint that will make it just that much harder for the family to think of celebration.

I know in my case, it felt just a bit like that – even though I didn’t have anyone die on a past Thanksgiving.

In my case, my mother died last year about a week-and-a-half prior to Thanksgiving. I remember this time last year celebration was about the last thing I cared about. Actually, I don’t really remember much about one year ago – it is just a haze.

This year on Thanksgiving, my mother maintained a place in the back of my mind. In large part, it is because I have been told that among her final thoughts before she suddenly lost consciousness and died within an hour was to think aloud to herself about all the last-minute preparations she would have to do in coming days to prepare herself for Thanksgiving.

FOR SHE HAD it in her mind that my brother and I would spend that holiday with her and she wanted to be prepared for it.

Those preparations, of course, never came to be.

This was, and likely will always be, the one holiday that carries a bit of a taint for me in that I will notice my mother’s absence (periodically, I find myself blurting out to no one in particular, “I miss you, Mom”) moreso than usual.

Which is what I expect will be the same reaction that the Daley family will also experience – although I will be the first to admit that I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of what the Daleys actually did on Thursday or what they are feeling right now.

THIS IS MY attempt at an intelligent guess. Although I don’t think it is much of a stretch of logic to come to this conclusion.

One thing I will state right now is that I was pleased to learn of a public service to be held Sunday at the Chicago Cultural Center for those who feel compelled to turn out in public to pay their respects.

It will be separate from any funeral services held for Maggie Daley, which actually is something I think is admirable. A part of me always thinks it is gaudy for people who weren’t personally connected to the deceased to be showing up for the funeral and turning it into a virtual circus production.

This way lets the family pay their respects in some degree of privacy. And a big overblown funeral service is probably the last thing that the subdued first lady (until May, that is) would have wanted for herself.

I’M CURIOUS TO see just how many people turn out to show their respects for the Daley legacy (even though the Washington Post thinks the “big” story in Chicago on Friday is the Obama presidential re-election campaign locating here). It has me wondering if it will come close to the thousands who felt compelled to be a part of the atmosphere when former-Mayor Harold Washington died back in 1987.

And, oddly enough, he died on the day BEFORE Thanksgiving that year – which meant those holiday ad-stuffed newspapers we bought on Thanksgiving that year had word of Harold’s demise all over their front pages. Not exactly the most festive of events.

Maybe it’s just that the Thanksgiving holiday weekend is not a good time in general for people with Chicago political ties.

  -30-

Turkey at the Statehouse?

I remember a year some two decades ago when the Illinois General Assembly’s inability to approve a new budget before the beginning of the state’s fiscal year was so bad that the Legislature got stuck being in session on Independence Day.



Will this be the Statehouse mood on Thursday?



The Fourth of July. The holiday that they were supposed to be using to go back home and appear in parades and bask in the “glory” of being the local bigshot who gets to go to Springfield (I know, it sounds so lame when written out).

THEY WERE GRUMBLY and grouchy about having to be at the Statehouse, although somewhere in my collection of political memorabilia (some might just call it trash) I have a copy of the Legislature’s printed schedule from the day – with the U.S. flag imposed on its cover.

I couldn’t help but remember this when learning about the activity related to the Republican lawsuit that seeks to undo the political boundaries drawn by Democratic Party-oriented officials for Illinois’ congressional and legislative districts.

With the beginning of the filing process for nominating petitions coming up a week from Monday (Nov. 28, to be precise), the fear is that if the appeals court actually rules in a way that finds some merit to the GOP partisan lawsuit, the whole electoral cycle in Illinois will be thrown out of whack.

The word literally was given out that court officials hinted that Illinois’ Legislature should keep it in the back of their minds that they might need to convene in a special session during Thanksgiving week (if not on Thursday proper) to consider changes in the election cycle deadlines.

DOES THAT MEAN I ought to try to be at the “Statehouse in Springpatch” on Thursday (instead of with my father and step-mother and other relatives in the Beverly neighborhood) so I can get a companion holiday session legislative calendar?

Will we get a pilgrim with blunderbuss shotgun printed on the cover? Or perhaps some sort of native image.

That is, if we don’t just get a big fat turkey. Which might very well be the most appropriate image. Because this whole issue has become enveloped in such nonsense that I would like to think that the appeals court will recognize it as such and toss this lawsuit out.

Yes. Out!

FOR THOSE PEOPLE who are Republican partisans who now want to send me blistering e-mail messages telling me of the unjust actions that were committed, I don’t want to hear it.

Because I will be the first to concede that the boundaries for the congressional and legislative districts meant to reinforce the idea that Illinois is an urban state with strong political ties to Democratic Party officials.

It was meant to undermine Republican efforts to regroup (when Illinois treasurer is your party’s highest-ranking government post, you’re really not doing all that well – no matter how you try to spin it) politically.

It happened because the state constitution set up a process for reapportionment that, this time around, led to circumstances that gave Democrats complete control.

JUST AS THERE are other states where Republicans have complete control, and those state Legislatures went out of their way during the spring months to craft political boundaries that would reinforce their strength and undermine Democratic Party efforts at rebuilding.

Just as if the GOP had had a say in Illinois, they would have come up with boundaries whose purpose would be to undermine the Dems – most likely by trying to pen in Chicago and Cook County with as little political representation as possible and make sure those officials have no influence in the rest of the state.

In short, we’d have had the same mentality running amok.

When it comes to redistricting, it becomes about self-preservation and there are no “high-minded ideals” at work. If anything, people want to keep those “ideals” from squashing their own political futures.

SO I DON’T want to read or hear anyone claim that there’s anything noble about any of this. It’s all a power grab – one that I hope the special panel of judges considering this case recognizes.

Although it has been noted by some that two of the three judges considering this case were brought in specially from Indiana – from Indianapolis, not the federal court in neighboring Hammond (with the third being U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow – who got her moment of national attention six years ago when she found her family killed in her home’s basement).

Will that result in two judges inclined to take the rural Midwest view of Chicago being too big? Or will those Hoosiers have enough sense to not get wrapped up in partisan politics (even though anyone who claims judges never reflect their partisanship in court rulings is being naïve)?

All of which means I’m hoping for a bit of legal idealism. Because I know there is no political idealism when it comes to this issue.

AND IT WOULD be kind of funny seeing our legislators make turkeys out of themselves on Thanksgiving, trying to piece together a quickie new schedule for the election cycle leading up to the March 20 primary elections in Illinois.

Gobble. Gobble.

  -30-