Eat, Emote, and Not Be England
Do Kiwis have a Thanksgiving?
Thanksgiving arrives here in a weird spring silence. Halloween is every year more a mad US/NZ mashup, all sugar and plastic and roses in bloom, but come November the exchange goes quiet. Kiwis are drafting summer away-messages and finding child care for the Christmas work do. Americans turtle up and wait. We’ve got our own funny little holiday first. After years of skipping we’re all in again, joining a big Friendsgiving over the hill in Welly. No Kiwis invited.
Not to be rude, y’all! Both sides seem happy to set some boundaries. The split recalls China Mieville’s The City & the City, a novel set in two cities that exist side by side in different slivers of space-time. Citizens of each are forbidden from even seeing the other, and everyone learns to look away. On Thursday in American Wellington we’ll pull the kids from school for a ritual feast. On Thursday in Kiwi Wellington it’s just another Mini-Friday.
Now the hero in Mieville’s novel is a detective who must slip between the two cities to solve a crime. Reader, c’est moi! The mystery here is twofold:
What makes Thanksgiving so awesome? Because it’s awesome.
Does New Zealand, lacking the day itself, still perform versions of this awesomeness elsewhere in the calendar?
Pour a glass, cut some pie, and read on to find out. Kiwis, please tell me where I’ve got it wrong. Americans—just tell me I got it right.
A Day to Share Your Feelings
At my childhood Thanksgivings we’d go around the table and everyone would say something they were thankful for. This was gently excruciating, but gave the dinner a pleasant ritual heft. I can’t remember the last time I did this. Friendsgivings abroad come off more as dinner parties; in Shanghai we ate our turkey off steam trays at the bar. This is a loss, I think. Gratitude’s the vegetable of emotions. Learn to express it or die too young.
New Zealanders famously hate talking about feelings. The cliché is true: my last therapist here froze up mid-session and gave me a worksheet instead. One-on-one the gooey stuff comes out, greased by coffee or beer. Still, holiday-wise Anzac Day (April 25) is a public show of reverent grief with a far higher per capita participation than our own equivalents. Americans, when was your last Memorial Day parade? I’ve been to like four here. It’s a thing!
A Day to Not Be England
Thanksgiving is for small-r republicans. At that first mythic feast, the Indians had never been royal subjects while the Pilgrims were stoked to finally be out on their own. Their big move—Head West, Steal Land—would become the great American song and dance.
It’s wild to me that New Zealand—more carefully stolen, but much further west—still clings to the long faded empire who conquered it. Y’all do what feels right, I guess. Close schools for the King’s Birthday, make space for another country’s flag on your own. When you do break away, and break away you will, we’ll throw you a dinner. Maybe fry up a local bird.
A Day to Binge
Binge drinking is celebrated here, especially for blokes. Here’s Samuel Moore’s tribute to hungover Kiwi dads:
The word here is dusty, which I love. Dusty dads are far less loved in America. We’re still Pilgrims at heart. Meritocracy is the road to heaven.
Food, though! We’re kings of the binge.1 To an American eye there’s a moderation in New Zealand that presents as scarcity, or perhaps scarcity presenting as moderation. Coffees are tiny. Get to the potluck early or it might run out, like completely. I’ve seen blokes at a barbecue spend the whole afternoon drinking only the beer they brought themselves.
So we’ll bring two pies to dinner. Hell, better make it three. Skipping pumpkin to roast our own kumara (sweet potato.) Two orange pies. One purple. Abundance, baby!
A Day of Survival
As the myth goes, the Pilgrims would have died in their first New World winter without help from their kind Native American hosts. Some early settlers did, in fact, starve. In 1590 the Roanoke Colony famously vanished entirely. Our Thanksgiving gratitude carries beneath it a cold whiff of that first brush with death.2
I haven’t caught the same note in the NZ frontier stories I’ve read. Settlement here begins properly only in 1840, basically yesterday. It’s warmer, especially the North Island. The Crown’s got your back. There’s much loneliness and struggle, but the whole 19th-century slash-and-burn is recounted in a very business-like tone: I’m writing from Greytown, the country’s first planned inland settlement. Planned, with no suspense. Jane Campion’s The Piano is about a luxury item stuck on the beach. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter is about a family maybe freezing to death.
A Day of Truce
Thanksgiving used to be a day for the left and right factions in your family to either fight about politics or avoid the fight in a show of love. Newspapers this time of year once filled with well-meaning columns on the virtues of talking to The Other Side. All this is gone now: the newspapers, the columns, my dear National Review-reading grandfather.
Did I arrive in NZ too late to hear the same sermons? Did this country ever appoint a day to meet the Other Side? Maybe they don’t need it. I am still shocked to meet sane, educated Kiwis who regularly switch between Labour and National. Those days are slipping away here, too. For good reason, bellows each half, and deeper we descend into our cocoons.
A Day of Motion
Thanksgiving is for leavers. The Pilgrims got on the boat, and this year some 80 million Americans will travel more than fifty miles just to eat turkey.3 In John Hughes’ Planes, Trains, and Automobiles the holiday is less about family than sharing all those conveyances plus a motel bed with John Candy. Our truest American selves live at the airport.
Kiwis travel heaps, but you can catch the odd parochial suspicion here of movement for movement’s sake. This week the curmudgeons texted in to RNZ to complain that their fellow countrymen would dare fly to Auckland for a Metallica concert. A minority take, to be sure, but one built on a deep national myth that real Kiwi life belongs to the regions, the paddock, and the beach.
I submit that the Auckland concert pilgrimage is a Kiwi Thanksgiving of sorts: A holiday fueled by happy travel to the city where most of the country lives, rather than the iconic summer escape to coastal oblivion.
On the Auckland concert run:
A Day to Face the Settler Myth
New Zealand’s got us smoked on this one. Waitangi Day (Feb. 6) does the heavy political lifting at summer’s end. Matariki (July 10 next year) has become an official midwinter celebration of Te Ao Maori’s place in national life. In its new, wider adoption Matariki even has an emerging menu of soup and bread. Sometimes there’s kumara, or sweet potato. You sing waiata, or Māori songs. You look back, you look forward. A nation unites in truce across the settler/indigenous line. Our kids make lanterns and name the stars. Gratitude’s in there, clearly. Works for me.
On Matariki:
Americans my age, meanwhile, grew up with Thanksgiving’s cheerful old lie about Pilgrims and Indians sharing a meal of truce before centuries of slaughter kick off. These days we’ve replaced the slaughter with football. Back in the day before T-day dinner I’d meet my buddies at the park for our an annual touch football game. It’s a tradition. You call it The Turkey Bowl.
My friend is a twin. He and I were goodie-goodies, nerds, try-hards. We played as The Pilgrims. He went on to be student body president.
His twin was the rebel, with a twinkle in his eye. He and his friends were skaters. They played as The Indians. He went on to build bitchin’ custom 4x4s and post videos of himself burning rubber on residential streets.
Even as a boy I had a sense that my buddy and I were playing on the side of—I don’t know what, exactly. Order and civilization? Truth, justice, and the American way?
Almost goes without saying that none of us boys were actually Indian. Arizona’s got one of the country’s larger Native American populations, but I never saw any Navajo or Hopi or Tohono O’odham or Apache or Pima or Maricopa kids in our semiprecious freeway suburb. Never played played football with any, either. I wish I had.
Nearly forty years later I’m settling into another settler republic.
The Pilgrims invited the Indians, or so the myth goes. We probably should have invited the Kiwis. They’ve carried us through some weird winters. Taught my kids, bought me beers, showed me how to be cool about all the rainbows.
But here’s the thing. The Thanksgiving of myth is invented by America’s newest arrivals. It’s a housewarming party with the new roomies. It’s the beer you crack when the last box is off the truck.
Our Wellington Thanksgiving is the dead opposite. A tradition hauled from the Old Country. A reunion thrown by the leavers. We’ve rented a room to eat a bird that doesn’t live here.
“Wait,” my daughter says. “What are we even eating tomorrow?”
Turkey, sweetie.
“Is that like chicken, or…?”
Pretty much. It’s going to be super fun. Just a meal with your friends, and some new friends too. And we made all this pie!
“I don’t like sweet potato. So I’m not going to try it.”
You have no choice, sweetie. It’s your heritage. //
Maybe we should both skip this one. Kiwis have a relatively high obesity rate on the world scale (34.2%, ranked 33rd) but ain’t got nothing on Americans (42.9%, ranked 13th).
Canada does Thanksgiving too, in October because it’s cold up there. Margaret Atwood wrote a whole book declaring Survival the defining theme of Canadian literature. American stories moved quicky on to general ass-kicking, but we share this early note of settler fear.
One-hundred-something of those boring little kilometers. Whatever. Miles taste better.
Beautiful pie Dan, great work! One might even say... Ka pai!
Reckon the turkey was the closest they could find to a goose... the traditional 'big holiday bird' of Britain