Scary Holidays

Why Hasn't This Been on American Horror Story?

Ugh. Halloween amuses me. I’m not an enthusiastic dress-up type; I don’t do costumes. But still, I find most of what goes on at the end of October entertaining (except the movies; I just can’t do scary movies, because… they’re scary. Gremlins gave me nightmares, if that gives you any clue as to how susceptible I am to scary movie scare-baiting). The only thing I don’t like about Halloween (besides the movies, I mean) is that it is the kickoff for the end-of-year holiday season. I am decidedly not a fan of any culturally endorsed holiday that happens between Halloween and MLK day. Between November 1st and the Sunday before the the third Monday of January, I wish I was a bear and I could hibernate. I am so jealous of bears and box turtles (and bats, and bumblebees, and skunks, and fat-tailed dwarf lemurs, among others).¹

Because my mind does weird stuff like wander off to see how many animals hibernate, and then combines things like “scary movie” and “holiday,” I just found myself on IMDB. I wanted to see what sort of horror movies have been made about holidays. I discovered a weirdly interesting thing: there are a shit ton of movies that make Christmas and Valentine’s Day just as creepy and scary as Halloween, but those are the only other holidays that get this treatment.² That’s right. No scary creepies about popular holidays like Easter, President’s Day, or Thanksgiving.

OK, so I’m not surprised there are no scary movies about President’s Day. Most people probably wouldn’t even know it was a holiday if federal employees and bank tellers didn’t get the day off work. But Easter? It’s about a dead guy coming back to life! You’d think someone would do something with that. And then there’s Thanksgiving…

To my mind, Thanksgiving is way more scary than Halloween could ever be. But then, maybe the point of the horror genre is that even if you enjoy getting the crap scared out of you, somewhere in the back of your mind, you know it’s just a story, and that’s probably what makes the fear manageable and even fun, for some.

You can’t do that with Thanksgiving because the horror of it is real. It’s the sweet, nostalgic part of the myth that’s just a story. The horror surrounding this day is an endless abyss of neglected reckoning. With our history of genocidal violence, and the relentless (and continuing) oppression of those who dared to survive it, we, as a nation, would rather forget how this country took root in soil fertilized with the blood of the people who were here first.

So no horror stories today. Instead, we double down on our attraction to over-the-top gluttony, and make excuses for that by pretending it’s all about the togetherness and the gratitude. But we should not be offering thanks; doing so props up the lie that what we’ve taken was given willingly. Accepting bait-and-switch historical and cultural myths as justification for celebrating what should never have been celebrated is just a way of avoiding the truth.

OK, so Thanksgiving has evolved into more of a “be with family and friends and have gratitude” kind of deal, and the spin about the sweet little gathering with the really nice natives who shared their food and welcomed “us” is gradually fading, over the years, in favor of the emphasis on the family and gratitude trope. But still. We know. We can try not to remember, and we can pretend that it’s all way in the past and we’d have done it differently if we’d been there, and we can claim that the holiday isn’t about our history anymore anyway, so what’s the harm, right?

The harm is that refusing to acknowledge past harm perpetuates it. We may not be personally running amok killing people and taking their homeland, but we are still doing it as a nation, and living on land that was stolen, and acceptance of actions taken on our collective behalf, is still our responsibility. We wouldn’t have done it differently, because we aren’t doing it differently.

Regardless of how the story is told, one thing is for certain: the holiday is based on lies, and its purpose is denial and distraction.³ The harm doesn’t end until the repair is, at the very least, wholeheartedly attempted. No matter how much personal meaning we slap like cheap paint onto the surface of the day, the structure underneath remains the same, and our collective national attitudes, policies, and actions towards Indigenous people remains the same, too.

If you look closely, you can see the echoes of our weirdly twisted cultural denial in ghoulish traditions like POTUS pardoning a turkey. OK, it’s just a joke (but nothing is really ever just a joke). But think about it for a minute: one member of a particular species is pardoned. The use of that word implies they did something wrong, and we’re forgiving them for it. What the hell could a turkey do wrong? Are we pardoning it for simply being a turkey, or because we know it wouldn’t want us to kill it, and that’s criminal, to not willingly give up its life in service to our gluttony? We were going to punish it for being a turkey that doesn’t want to die. But out of the kindness of our big ol’ American hearts, we set it free (the rest of its kind are SOL, but whatever).

Now, think about why we’re OK killing turkeys, but — theoretically, and with lots of caveats — not other humans. It’s because we think we’re better than them, and our life is worth more, which makes it reasonable to use their very being for our own convenience, right? So if we want to slaughter some people, we’ll just call them savages, or animals, because we think that separates us from them, and puts us above, and makes us better, and makes it OK for us to use them however we please, and kill them if they don’t submit to our whims.

That whole pardon the turkey thing? It’s this entire nation, in denial about the wholesale slaughter and glutton-fueled consumption that surrounds both Thanksgiving and the egregious violence of colonization from which the holiday was born. It’s a twisted, pathetic attempt at somehow justifying as reasonable, the harm we’ve done for the sake of greed and gluttony. No need to worry about the damage done, past, present, or future, because we pardoned a turkey! We’re all good, carry on!

If we’re going to continue to observe this day, we should rename it (perhaps, as many Indigenous people do, we could observe it as a day of mourning, instead). We should offer apology, witnessing, and repair. Until we, as a nation, are willing to openly own our horrifically violent, genocidal origin story, acknowledge the truth that we (all of us who live here and are not of Indigenous descent) benefit from the spoils of murderous conquest, witness the expressed experiences of continued oppression, and commit to a path of reparation, we have no right to the holiday. Thanksgiving is not ours to celebrate. There is no way to celebrate it no matter how it is cloaked, without perpetuating and building on the centuries of harm that surround it.

1. Animals That Hibernate

2. IMDB search on horror and holidays

3. I’m not going to go into detail about the origin or historical inaccuracies regarding the holiday. There’s plenty of information already available on that. Here’s a good place to start, if you want to learn about it: https://blog.nativehope.org/what-does-thanksgiving-mean-to-native-americans