from thanksgiving eve to blue christmas...

For 30 years, in the spirit of Pete and Arlo, my various churches celebrated Thanksgiving Eve as a Night of American Music. In one incarnation, it was like a Prairie Home Companion: lots of group singing, emphasis on folk songs and the blues. In time, it became more like the Last Waltz with special guests playing short sets, the house band rocking things up, and a few a capella gospel tunes added for good measure.

All that came to a close 12 years ago when a massive snowstorm shut down the town. The Thanksgiving Eve shows never recovered. And while we have shared a variety of other benefits, one era had clearly ended - and, truth be told, I am still nostalgic for the magic we shared on those sacred nights.

After COVID, the core band regrouped into what is now Wednesday's Child. On Sunday, December at @ 4 pm in Palmer, MA, Wednesday's Child will offer up a "BLUE CHRISTMAS/LONGEST NIGHT" encounter with song and silence, prayer and candlelight, as an act of refuge and solidarity with all who grieve during this season. It is a quiet and safe space to feel all those complicated emotions truth so often obscured by popular culture.

These days, the promise and potential of that first Massachusetts Thanksgiving in 1621 still resonates in my soul. That's why we slip out of town for a few quiet days of rest and reflection on the big picture - NOT the sentimental or sanitized version of this holiday that ignores the genocide the white settlers committed not long after the harvest feast - but the whole story. For we must own that legacy even as we strive to live into and through it. Historians agree that the English Pilgrims and others didn't make contact with the Wampanoag people for the first four months on North American soil.

"The "real history" of Thanksgiving involves a 1621 harvest feast between Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag people, which was a brief moment of cooperation that contrasts with the subsequent history of conflict and oppression. The traditional narrative focuses on the 1621 event, while more complete histories acknowledge the violence and displacement of Native Americans that followed. From a Native American perspective, particularly the Wampanoag, Thanksgiving is often seen as a day of mourning, not celebration."

If you are free, please join on in December. We're using the music of Sarah MacLachlan, Bruce Springsteen, Alanis Morissette, David Bowie, NIN/Johnny Cash, and others for a quiet time of owning and sharing the complexities of this season.