In the Worldwide Church of God, November had always been a month of quiet rebellion against the world’s calendar.
While the rest of America roasted turkeys and hung paper pilgrims on elementary-school windows, Sister Miriam’s family ate canned beans and read from the book of Deuteronomy. Thanksgiving, the ministers said from the pulpit, was a pagan observance rooted in harvest festivals to false gods. To sit at its table was to share in the sins of Babylon.So on the fourth Thursday of November 1978, twelve-year-old Daniel sat in the living room of their small house in Pasadena, watching his mother iron Ambassador College booklets instead of basting a bird. The radio was off. The curtains were drawn. The only scent in the air was hot cotton and the faint metallic tang of the iron.His father, Elder Thomas, paced with the Bible open in one hand. “Deuteronomy 12,” he said, voice rising like he was still behind the lectern at services. “Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes.”Daniel knew the verse by heart. He knew them all by heart.At noon the family knelt for prayer. They thanked God for the truth, for separating them from the deceived masses, for the coming Kingdom when no one would ever celebrate heathen days again. Daniel’s stomach growled loud enough that his little sister Ruth giggled, then clapped both hands over her mouth in terror.After prayer came lunch: boiled potatoes and canned green beans, the same meal they ate most Thursdays. No one spoke of turkey. No one dared.But that afternoon, while his parents napped—an exhaustion born of three-hour Sabbath services and tithing three times over—Daniel slipped out the back door. He biked the six blocks to the house of Tommy Alvarez, a Catholic boy from school whose mother always left a plate on the porch for strays, human or otherwise.Tommy’s family was loud in the way Daniel’s never was. His abuela pressed a paper plate into Daniel’s hands without questions: thick slices of turkey swimming in gravy, marshmallow-crusted yams, a roll still warm from the oven. She kissed the top of his head and called him mijo even though he wasn’t hers.He ate behind the garage, crouched between trash cans so no church member driving past would see. The first bite of turkey was so good it felt like sin and salvation at once. Grease ran down his wrist. He licked it clean, guilty and grateful in the same breath.When the plate was empty he buried it deep in Tommy’s trash, under coffee grounds and eggshells. Then he biked home fast, the taste of forbidden plenty still coating his tongue.That night his father led family Bible study on the dangers of “the traditions of men.” Daniel bowed his head with the others, eyes closed, heart racing.He never confessed. He never took another plate.But every fourth Thursday for the rest of his life, no matter where he was or what he believed, Daniel remembered the taste of that stolen Thanksgiving, warm, shameful, and impossibly kind, and felt something dangerously close to gratitude for a world his church had taught him to fear.
The ambivalence over Thanksgiving in this case was at best misguided.
Who can say?
Since, in theory (a debunked one), the United States (and Canada has Thanksgiving too, but a month earlier) is supposedly descended from ancient Israel.
Just how do we know that the Thanksgiving tradition didn’t have its roots in that heritage? Perhaps, outside of the regular Feasts, there was a long forgotten addition (like Purim, for example), where people gathered together and feasted to give thanks for all the divine gifts.
What about that, huh? Ever think about that?
So maybe Thanksgiving was supposed to exist from the very beginning. Maybe in the Garden of Eden, even. Maybe a legacy from Noah?
How dare the Armstrongists throw shade on something that is so godly? Except for the football game.
So we’re so thankful today. Thankful for the engineers, scientists, people who support our infrastructure, the farmers, the ranchers, medical doctors and nurses, the vendors of all good things. Thankful for the day after, for all the sales.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone… well… to the people who keep it today, anyway.
I am a little confused. I grew up in the WCG from 1958 on, and we always celebrated Thanksgiving. It wasn’t hidden it was encouraged,. We had big blowouts too, with many church members and even ministers. Unless of course this is satire?
I brilliantly applied the airtight “logic” of the armstrongists to the Thanksgiving holiday that, shockingly, has zero connection to paganism. Yet, as Christmas inevitably rolls around again as a yearly rerun, we’ll once more be treated to the armstrongist choir joyously screeching “PAGAN!!!” from their pulpits, while dutifully regurgitating per verbatim, of course the same tired, fabulously debunked lies that dear old herbert wanker armstrong so generously gifted humanity during his glorious reign as the patron saint of a wealthy spiritual crime family.