Shoved to Them
Two Chinese students joined our family for the week of Thanksgiving. The dorms were closed for maintenance, and the school sent out a plea for homes for the students unable to travel to their homes for the holiday, and so we took in two young men from China.
Our bustling household filled with children was a shock to them. Raised in a world of only children, they were initially overwhelmed by the reality of the six we still have at home. One of the young men, who goes by the American name David, is an only child without cousins, aunts or uncles. The other, Sean, has an elder sister. It took his parents and grandparents years to raise the $45,000 bribe to gain permission to have a second child. He told us how relieved everyone was that he was a boy, because their was no way for them to either raise that amount again or gain permission for a third child.
Thanksgiving itself didn’t seem to hold much interest for them. Instead, they were focused almost entirely on Black Friday. They scoured ads and compared the advertised deals. They asked me repeatedly where we would be shopping, and were confused when I said that we don’t do Black Friday shopping unless it’s online. We much prefer to eat leftovers, watch movies, and lounge around in our pajamas all day Friday.
On Thanksgiving, dinner started at two o’clock, and our house-guests were already checking the time before we had even begun to eat. David looked at me nervously and asked if we would be done eating by 4:00, and would I take them to Best Buy for their opening time of 5:00. When I told him again that we don’t shop on Thanksgiving, he used his phone to order an Uber car for 4:30.
I don’t know how many shops they hit between Thursday afternoon and 3:45 the next afternoon when they came dragging back through the door with tales of all the things they had bought “very much cheap.” Twenty-three straight hours of shopping and then they fell into bed and slept until 10:00 the next morning.
As we got ready to take them back to the dorms on Saturday morning, David asked me, “Your family is not very patriotic?”
I was momentarily surprised, and answered, “We’re very patriotic, David. Why would you ask that?”
“You didn’t participate in the celebrations.”
It seems that our foreign guests totally misunderstood the holidays last week. In their minds, the real festival was Black Friday. They saw Americans celebrating our national wealth and abundance with an all-night shopping orgy that saw stores open for 24 hours straight and huge crows lined up to take part. They saw the media reports as further proof that Black Friday was about showing how well our government runs our economy in a massive propaganda scheme.
What about the Thanksgiving dinner, I asked him.
That was the cleverness of Americans, he explained to me. We have a day of gorging ourselves on food on Thursday to give us the strength to make it through the shopping sprees to come.
These men who have lived in America for over six months each, who have studied American culture for years, and worked hard to prepare themselves for the week at my house, never got the message that the whole point was thankfulness and gratitude, and I don’t think we were able to counteract any of what they had seen. Thanksgiving has been overshadowed by an annual rampage of greed. When foreigners can’t be convinced that it’s anything other than a nation-wide shopping binge, maybe it’s time for us to reexamine who we want to be as a people.
As for me and my family, our un-patriotic selves didn’t take part in the “propaganda hype.” We drank hot chocolate and stayed in our pajamas until it was time for Mass on Sunday morning.
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