[This post previously appearted on my deviantArt Journal.]
Liminality is a special interest of mine. Liminal, from the Latin limen,
meaning "threshold," refers to the state of being between states, of
being on the border, caught in transition between two things—not one
thing or another.
Stand in a doorway: you are liminal in the
most basic, literal sense...you are neither inside nor outside. The
concept is related to that of "limbo," the name for the state of
afterlife that is neither Heaven nor Hell in medieval European thought,
and now the word is applied to any realm or state that is "on the edge,"
or suspended-between. Psychologists talk of liminal mental states,
being caught in the midst of some rite of passage, neither quite out of
the old state nor quite all into the next.
Folklore has always been
fascinated with liminality, with between-ness. Times and places seen as
borders are given magical significance. We carry brides across the
threshold because the liminality is dangerous—the liminality of both her
place (neither inside nor outside) and her personal state (neither
single nor quite married—after the wedding but before the sex, in the
old way of thinking, made you a married virgin, a contradiction in
terms) combining to make her doubly in danger. Various spirit-beings
(themselves liminal) were believed to desire human wives and be willing
to abduct them; next to babies, new wives were said to be the favorite
prey of the Fair Folk. Heroes who were blessed with magical protection
always had a loophole of liminality whereby they could be killed. Lleu
Llaw Gyffes could be killed neither "during the day or night, nor
indoors or outdoors, neither riding nor walking, not clothed and not
naked," etc. A murder attempt was made at dusk, under a canopy-roof,
when he had one foot on a cauldron and one on a goat, while wrapped in a
fishing net, etc. etc.
Twilight and dawn (neither day nor
night) are the liminal times of day. In the words of one of the
eeriest-sounding of the classic Disney songs:
Halfway in day
And halfway in night
Lies a world half in shadow
And halfway in light...
That's
why Rod Serling chose "The Twilight Zone" as the name of his show about
weirdness and surreality—because it was one of those spooky, half-way,
threshold times.
The Celtic high holy days of Samhain (SOW-en) and Beltane -
Halloween and May Day - were borders of the year, the threshold between
Summer and Winter, and therefore times when the spirit world was closer
to the physical one. This is why Halloween is scary; the world of the
dead is closer to the world of the living. The soltices and equinoxes,
to the more astronomically-minded, were the liminal times when the sun
changed direction or the daylight and darkness were evenly matched.
They were also considered dangerously liminal. Telling ghost stories
used to be a traditional Christmas pastime; that's why Charles Dickens
wrote a ghost-filled Christmas story.
Which brings me to Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving
occupies a strange place in the American consciousness: it lies halfway
between Halloween and Christmas, and shares symbolism with both of
them. Pumpkins, gourds, and Indian corn? Check. Snowy weather and a
big, turkey-based family dinner? Check. It's ostensibly a harvest
festival, but held much too late in the year to actually be one. (In its European homelands, Halloween was traditionally the last
day of harvest, the day when anything left in the fields should be left
to the spirits of the dead that roamed free that night...having been
touched by the spirit world, it became "liminal food" of a sort, and
dangerous to the living.)
In England, from which the bulk of our
American culture descends, there's no Thanksgiving to get in the way;
after Halloween, the Christmas season starts. Retailers in the U.S.
treat Thanksgiving as a little intruder in their Christmas advertising;
they dedicate a little section to novelty turkey and Pilgrim items, but
otherwise ignore it. Thankgiving is too non-commercial a holiday for
anyone (but grocery stores) to really profit from it, so it's little
more than a little harvest-colored hiccup in the otherwise firmly red
and green Christmas décor.
This used to bother me. As a kid I
(ike most young children) had an overdeveloped sense of propriety:
things should only happen at the proper times and places, and people who
violated the proper sequence of events ought to be ashamed. "Christmas
doesn't begin until after Thanksgiving. They're not supposed to put up Christmas stuff until then!"
As
I grew older I started to wonder: what was the deal with Thanksgiving?
The Pilgrims could not possibly have had their First Thanksgiving in
November; it was way too cold then. (It was held somewhen between
September 21 and November 9, most likely in "very early October,"
according to mayflowerhistory.com; the Canadian Thankgiving, on the
first Monday of October, reflects this more traditional timing.) So how
the heck did this harvest festival get shunted so late in the year?
Why (ask many dismayed family cooks) is
one huge turkey-feast held only a month after another?
The answer, I discovered, had to do with those same Pilgrims who started the whole thing. More generally, it was the Puritans.
You
see, the Puritans wanted to celebrate Christmas without, you know,
celebrating Christmas. Christmas, back in those days, was less a family
holiday and more a license to party: filled with drunken antics, lewd
behavior, and general naughtiness, it was a time to cut loose and go
wild. It was really more like our modern New Years, minus the
countdown; or like the American St. Patrick's day, minus the Irish
symbolism. You got drunk, you danced, you gambled, and if you were lucky
you got laid, or at least got to flirt outrageously and cop a few
feels. Christmas, before the Victorians got to it, was like one big
frat party—and it lasted for twelve days.
Can you see the Puritans putting up with that in their new homeland? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Many
Puritan communities banned Christmas outright. As America grew larger,
many people came over who were not Puritan and they brought Christmas
and its extended party-time spirit over with them. This created
conflict, as non-Puritans wanted to celebrate and many lower-echelon
Puritans began to think a little bit of merriment might be nice once in a
while.
So what some Puritan folks did was try something a little
sneaky: over to one side was this other holiday, this harvest festival
born of one of the few peaceful interactions with the European settlers
and the Native Americans: a harvest thanksgiving feast. It expressed
what they felt was the proper spirit for a holiday (a Holy Day): quiet
and reverent gratitude toward God for His generosity. You got to eat
hearty and spend a day relaxing (well, the menfolk did, anyway) but the
license to revel in debauchery could be revoked.
So over the
years, the Puritans made Thanksgiving into a kind of substitute
Christmas. They shoved it later in the year and made it their
last-feast-before-the-deprivations-of-deep-winter celebration, with its focus firmly on thanking Providence, with none of those outrageous heathen associations to get in the way.
That
is why Thanksgiving is so late in the year. That's why it draws from
the symbols of both Harvest and Solstice celebrations, yet is not fully
part of either. It is a celebration that is all about the New World
(including, of course, elements of Native American harvest festivals)
yet is steeped in enough traditional rituals from the Old World to seem
almost as ancient as them. It is a time to relax and party, and has
become nearly a secular celebration (something that would, of course,
have appalled the Puritans), yet it has retained a Puritan sense of
unadorned domesticity—it's a small and homelike celebration, not a
society-wide mass festival. It has resisted the lures of commercial or
celebratory excess, and most of its traditions (except for the football)
would probably please the Puritans' strait-laced little hearts.
Thanksgiving
is, in fact, a kind of liminal holiday: neither one thing nor another.
It is a liminal time that resists all the eerie associations of most
liminal times. This has the odd effect of making it a liminal thing
itself, by virtue of its very non-liminality.
Freaky, huh?
That's
the kind of contradiction that the Fair Folk and Rod Serling just loved. I can't help but think they both would have approved.
