(originally published November 27th, 2005)

It’s interesting how even a holiday like Thanksgiving can show how people have different perspectives on things.

For me, Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. It was the only day of the year my entire family, of which there was 3 of us until my grandmother moved in, sat at the same time at the dinner table together; I have an interesting family. For every other holiday, we eat whenever we get the time, in our own separate places; that’s how I grew up.

I was talking to one person before the holiday, and he said he could care less about most holidays, but especially Thanksgiving or Christmas. His reasoning was that, because he was a farm child living with his grandparents, those two holidays meant he had to work harder and longer to produce things for the family to sell, and for the meal his grandmother would eventually have to cook.

I met someone else who said they saw Thanksgiving as white America’s opportunity to celebrate the day they put one over on native Americans by expressing one thought and doing something else, which was to try to wipe out the original population of this continent.

Most of the people I meet in my life tend to think positively about Thanksgiving. However, in light of some of the other recent thoughts I’ve been privy to, it teaches the lesson that we always need to be cognizant of how others perceive things we possibly see differently, because we never want to get caught off guard in possibly insulting someone else, or their beliefs. You never know when it could sneak up on you.