The End of Thanksgiving

This last weekend an new animated holiday movie came out titled "Free Birds." Its a whimsical movie about turkeys and the first Thanksgiving. Although the movie was supposed to be about Thanksgiving, there was no actual giving of thanks other than a five second bit about Governor Bradford thanking the time traveling turkeys for pizza. (I'll wait while you reread that to make sure you got it right)

So what can we draw from this? Well, it is blatant re-writing of Thanksgiving in pop culture. It has been the recent habit of the media to ignore Thanksgiving in favor of Black Friday, but this is the first time that we are told the Thanksgiving story with the intent to leave God and the God-fearing men and women out of the story. In fact, the settlers may look like Puritans and Separatists, but they act like anything but Godly people in the movie. Yes, historically there were many settlers who were not Pilgrims - many of the settlers were greedy businessmen - but they didn't have the traditional clothing of those we like to call "Pilgrims".

So what we see is the acceptance, or more the preaching, of an originally godless Thanksgiving. There is no mention of being thankful, instead the entire movie consists of the "Pilgrims" complaining. Now, it being a movie about time-traveling turkeys, one has to take things with a rather massive grain of salt, but the fact is that they go out of their way to portray Thanksgiving as just time with family. Not time to count our blessings or thank God for them, but just to be with our family. Of course, family time is wonderful, but there is more to Thanksgiving than that.

Personally, I would rather have Thanksgiving dropped as a National Holiday than have it re-written in this way. I think we as Christians should still celebrate Thanksgiving, but in actual giving of thanks, not just a turkey and some stuffing.

But back to "Free Birds". I'm not saying we need to condemn the movie itself. This is of little use and makes no sense to those who don't see why this bothers us. Instead, we need to focus on what we are to do as Christians, which is to shine as a light for God. If we take our time to be truly thankful, and to give God thanks, we are fulfilling part of our requirement as Christians. We cannot change people by condemning things when they don't agree with our convictions; instead we need to show them God by love and obedience to God's command. Let us be a light of Thanksgiving this year. Let us show the world that we have been with Jesus.