Happy Thanksgiving, America!

Here in Australia, we know exactly what American Thanksgiving is.

Thanksgiving is leaves

Dear America,

Happy Thanksgiving from Down Under: As we understand it is traditional to say in your country at this time of year, “I’m alone!”

Here in Australia, our internet is powered by our Prime Minister’s pipe-dreams, so we can only use it intermittently and one at a time. But we know a great many things about your celebrations from the second-hand movies you donate to us, which we all watch together under a big sheet on a beach. How you make your sky cry soft white tears using family reconciliation montages and Peter Gabriel’s voice, we will never know.

What we have not learned from your movies, we have been told by Cate Blanchett. Sometimes she will fly back from visiting you using her long graceful arms, and we will gather around her and slather her with sunblock. Then she will take a drag of a cigarette and let out a series of deep, rhythmic laughs. Her translator will explain to us the gist of her expressions, because she only speaks Trans-Atlantic American since she was in Carol.

As Cate says, ‘Hah haar!’ meaning: ‘Every Thanksgiving begins with a cigarette and ends with a creamed spinach.’

Anyway, enough about us and our traditions. We hope you have a lovely time symbolically pardoning the turkeys because of that time when they genocided you.

We hope you are filled with the Spirit of Thanksgiving when you observe the true cultural heritage of Jesus on Black Friday. We are concerned by the ethics of The Running of the Workers through your department stores, but we appreciate the idea of sacrifice for capital gain and unmatched savings.

The ancient ritual of public trampling.

We hope you have a hand to hold, during the annual radio-play retelling of The Great Story: How Pumpkins Became a Tinned Vegetable.

We dream of your magic, America. We admire the way you tuck your children into bed on Thanksgiving Eve and whisper to them about the big man with the orange-peel suit and smokers-stain toupee who gives out branded hats and unsolicited opinions from his golf cart. We admire the way you stuff a chicken into a duck into a turkey to explain ‘How the melting pot happened’.

We cannot claim to intimately understand so many of these traditions. This is because our nation state struggles to recognize its systems of colonial privilege long enough to meaningfully reconcile the consequences of its violent racist acts, which seems like an intense sentence, but only if you read it. And from what we understand, there is no reading on Thanksgiving, only free screenings of You’ve Got Mail.

When you want to avoid people in the cheese section because you’re an independent bookstore owner who just discovered the internet — haha, awkward. We get it! What a fantastic Pilgrim film.

But these things you do appeal greatly to us, and give us an acute sense of how a peoples can live happily without universal health care in merciless seasonal cold.

So, in the spirit of the season, we would like to give thanks to you.

We give thanks to you for providing Cate Blanchett enough work for us to adore her, but not enough for her to stay away from here so we culturally reject her, like Nicole Kidman.

Thank you for teaching us what a cornucopia is by having a big one in a parade. We liked the sound of the word, but some of us had thought it was a fancy way of talking about someone who suffered from many corns.

And finally, thank you for Thanksgiving. And jazz. And Canada. And democracy. And for participating in the Olympics.

This is a great holiday.

Australia

Rosanna Stevens is an Australian writer and musician. You can find her work in The Best of the Lifted Brow II, and on the internets.