Importance Of Thanksgiving Rituals

The day before Thanksgiving, Wednesday, November 23, 2016, my parents, sister, and I file into my dad’s 2006 Chevy Silverado (with five dogs and luggage) and we travel to my paternal grandparent’s house in Mansfield, Ohio for a great Thanksgiving celebration. During the two-hour car ride from Warren, Ohio to Mansfield, Ohio, my family listens to the Sirius XM Holiday Music Channel. We partake in the “premature listening to Christmas music ritual” because as my dad expresses, “My girls are home from college and I made my cranberry dressing, it feels like the holidays to me.” Under this reasoning, my family deems it acceptable to prematurely listen to the holiday music. As we arrive at my grandparent’s house, the dogs start jumping and wagging
Siskind continues, “Thanksgiving brings family members back home, physically and emotionally, ritually transforming attenuated ties of kinship into a strong bond” (168). Additionally, the rituals such as “forgetting to buy an ingredient,” “the slicing of the turkey,” and “the distributing the leftovers” bond my family in immeasurable ways. Through recording these rituals, I noticed that gender ideologies, material culture, and speech acts contribute greatly in the process of the rituals. Depending upon gender, different members of my family have different roles in the preparation of the meals. Throughout the ritual, I observed that we value different material culture items including food, drinks, gifts, and clothes. During our ritual, my family partakes in several speech acts including storytelling and praying. Also, my Thanksgiving tradition compares to the writings of Janet Siskind, James Spradley and Brenda Mann, and Micaela di Leonardo. Thus, the concepts gender ideologies, material culture, and speech acts connect through my family’s multiple rituals to form the identity of American Thanksgiving