Thanksgiving, the Grinch, and men as villagers

A few thoughts for the holiday season

Credit: Apple

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown, especially during this busy holiday season.

I had a different post I was going to publish today about the value of formal institutions for community building. But then I remembered that it’s the Friday after Thanksgiving and everyone is probably in a food coma (or perhaps a shopping coma? Or stuck in an airport? If that is you, you have my sympathies).

So I’m going to save that post for later, and instead mention a few things that are on my mind:

The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is about community building

It’s now the Christmas season, which means I can once again reup my post on the Grinch, which is one of my favorite things I’ve written for this blog. The thesis in the piece is that the Whos down in Whoville unreservedly forgave the Grinch after he burgled their homes — even though they certainly knew he was the culprit. A transgressor was welcomed back into the community, and even given a place of honor at the feast table.

Typically we think of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas as a story from the Grinch’s perspective, but I think it takes on a different — and perhaps more profound — meaning if the Whos are the protagonists. And it’s their attitude of acceptance and tolerance that allows the community to exist. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in light of debates about whether people actually want villages and — to quote Cartoons Hate Her — people “behaving in a villagey way.” The Whos do behave in a villagey way, and I think they offer a useful parable for the rest of us. Anyway, here’s the link to the original Grinch post again.

Thanksgiving is the best holiday

There are many wonderful holidays, but Thanksgiving is by far my favorite. It’s a holiday almost entirely about spending time with loved ones¹, and which stubbornly resists commercialization. There is Spirit Halloween, and now Spirit Christmas. But there will never be a spirit Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is also a holiday filled with rituals — food preparation, turkey trots, football — but rituals that are all malleable enough to remain current. My family lives in Utah and thus a few years ago added “funeral potatoes,” perhaps Utah’s most characteristic dish, to our feast. Then this year a southerner joined our family and brought mac and cheese. And the dinner was better for it.

Thanksgiving is also secular. Though I love many religious holidays, Thanksgiving is perhaps the biggest celebration of the year during which a Christian and a Jew and a Muslim etc. could theoretically sit down together and celebrate — not because they were sampling each others’ cultures but because they’d be co-participants in a shared culture. No society is perfect, but the accessibility of Thanksgiving, along with its adaptability, captures in my mind the beauty of living in a pluralistic democracy.

I could go on, but for now I will just say that I’m especially thankful this year for anyone who reads this blog. Thank you.

“Some of the villagers have to be men”

Richard Reeves, author of the buzzy book Of Boys And Men, posted earlier this week about dads, and this paragraph jumped out to me:

It takes a village. I agree. Families come in all shapes and sizes. I agree. But some of the villagers should be men. We need to be very careful in our inclusion of different ways to raise kids that we don't advertently or inadvertently airbrush out the role of men.

Reeves is arguing here (as he has elsewhere) that we need better ways to think about the role of men and masculinity, and I agree.

But as a man myself, this paragraph also offered a reminder that I have to think about the ways I’m building the village. One of my favorite concepts I’ve learned about while writing this blog is “kinkeeping,” which refers to the labor of organizing a family unit. So, a kinkeeper maintains communication between family members, organizes get-togethers, keeps traditions alive, preserves family lore, and so on. Historically, women have often served as their families’ primary kinkeepers.

But in this modern age when men and women both tend to be wage earners, and have equal access to communication tools like text messaging, many of us men probably need to step up and do more kinkeeping. It’s not like most dudes are out today hunting bison while the wives gossip together around the loom.

All of which is to say that I agree with Reeves that men are at risk of being airbrushed out of the picture. But also, there’s a tendency among us men to step back and let women do all the kinkeeping work — or, to airbrush out ourselves.² Reeves’ post was a reminder to me, at least, to do better. The only people who get a village are the people who proactively make themselves villagers.

Kids as a capstone, parenthood as low status

In my last post, I mentioned that some people seem to postpone having kids because they think of parenthood as a “capstone” event — or something you do once all your ducks are in a row. (I was one of those people, to my detriment.)

Then this week, The Atlantic ran a Q&A with Anastasia Berg, co-author of the book What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. I haven’t read this book, and I don’t share all of the authors’ views. But I did find the conversation illuminative, and Berg essentially makes the same “capstone” point about kids:

People are postponing the milestones of relationship and are holding their relations to very high standards of readiness, of stability and security, before they so much as think about having kids.

Berg also points to shows such as Girls, Friends, Homeland, Broad City and Scandal as examples of pop culture that either don’t portray motherhood at all, or that portray it in a negative light. She’s talking about women, though I do think this applies to some degree to men as well (I certainly felt this in my pre-parenthood years). Speaking about pop culture, Berg argues that many shows suggest

…that once you have a child, our interest in you, as an adult, ends in a way that is particularly threatening to women. Your life as an intellectual, creative, socially exciting person that we would have an interest in—that’s over for you.

What I think we see here is that parenthood is consistently portrayed as an activity that conveys no status benefits, or which actually hurts one’s status (the latter case probably being more common for women than for men). I have a lot of thoughts on this, but it is refreshing to see this issue being discussed and critiqued from a left-of-center perspective, rather than exclusively from the right. We’ll never do better if this is merely a partisan concern.

Berg also points out that it’s a relatively new phenomenon that people would view the decision to have kids through a lens of opportunity cost. In other words, in the past having kids were simply an automatic thing that you did. I actually really loved the way Berg put it, so I’ll end today on this quote:

Until not very recently, people thought of themselves essentially intergenerationally, and they thought of children as something that belonged to the very framework of human life.

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1. I know there is a founding myth about Thanksgiving that involves Pilgrims and Native Americans. But I don’t think this story really has any bearing on the way most people celebrate the holiday, nor does it even come up in conversation for most people I know. It’s not like Christmas where, despite significant secularization, Jesus and the Nativity are still fairly central images.

2. A while back there was a discussion on social media about the tendency of men to merge into the families of their wives, rather than vice versa. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but if men were doing their fair share of kinkeeping I’d expect more balanced merging trends. The fact that so many people just take for granted that matrilineal relationships are stronger suggests to me that there are a lot of dudes letting their family relationships languish.