Thanksgiving is all about appreciating what we’ve got, which seems especially poignant this year because Christmas is right on Thanksgiving’s rear bumper, like a Maserati trying to blow past a Volkswagen Beetle.
Don’t give an inch, Thanksgiving. Block out the road hog. You’re a grand old holiday, maybe the best, and if your charms are not always appreciated, maybe that’s because you feel no need to put on a big show, which is so Midwestern, if you know what we mean.
Like the food. We love your down-home food, Thanksgiving. Nothing fancy. We’ll take turkey and mashed potatoes over pickled seaweed and crystallized violets any day. We want pumpkin pie, not cotton candy burritos. We want lemon squares, not popcorn that smokes in your mouth.
Seriously. There is such a thing.
Like the naps. We love the naps, Thanksgiving. When dinner’s over, Uncle Bob watches football on TV and Mom watches the dog show but we fall asleep in a chair in a corner. On Christmas Day, this is poor form. On New Year’s Day, it means we’re hung over. On Thanksgiving, it’s what we do.
Like the expectations. We love the zero expectations, Thanksgiving. Nobody’s trying to live in an old Fred Astaire movie. Nobody hopes to see a new car in the driveway with a bow on it. Nobody cares if Clarence gets his wings.
You’re the best, Thanksgiving, because you’re plain and beautiful at once. You’re about family and friends and everybody giving each other a break. You leave the politics at the door. Childhood grievances, too.
Now don’t take this the wrong way, Thanksgiving, but you’re sometimes a flyover holiday, like Chicago is sometimes a flyover town. We tell ourselves we’re a global city, and we can make a good case, but tell it to a New Yorker. People glance down at you, Thanksgiving, en route to Christmas and New Year’s.
Their loss.
What Chicago’s got that can’t be beat, Thanksgiving, is architecture. We talk about architects the way New Yorkers talk about Yankees. We make up dream teams. How about Frank Lloyd Wright for single-family houses, Mies van der Rohe for office towers, Louis Sullivan for theaters, Frank Gehry for concert pavilions and Jeanne Gang for boardwalks?
Really? You prefer Frederick Law Olmsted for boardwalks? Did Olmsted ever even design a boardwalk? His thing was rocks. We’ll trade you even for Mies.
But even when it comes to architecture, Thanksgiving, a lot of the best Chicago stuff gets no respect, just like you. Don’t let it get to you.
All over the South Side in particular are terrific buildings that get overlooked, at least by people who are not South Siders. It took one of the South Side’s very own — former Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey — to figure that out and showcase a lot of the buildings in a new book, “Southern Exposure.”
So if the Rookery Building in the Loop is Christmas and the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park is New Year’s Eve, then Chicago Vocational High School on the South Side is Thanksgiving. What a classic example of 1930s Arte Modern design.
CVS is terrific, but people blow past it on their way to something else.
Just like you, Thanksgiving.
Really and truly, you’re the best.
And we’re looking forward to the nap.
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