Havre de Grace -- Thanksgiving is a resolutely secular American holiday, celebrating the blessings of the here-and-now, not the promise of the hereafter. Yet it has become the most spiritual American holiday too. There is a connection.
Religious holidays are by their very nature exclusive. They belong by right to the faithful, and not to any curious heathen who decides on the spur of the moment to drop in and share. But because in America the very idea of exclusivity offends, there is constant pressure to make every religious holiday more ecumenical, and to welcome everyone in the neighborhood to celebrate too.
Such pressure, whether it comes from within, from religious leaders wishing to seem more down to earth, or from without, from governments to whom every closed door is a challenge, is inevitably counter-productive. It erodes the significance of the holy day to believers, and at the same time cheapens it for non-believers, and diminishes their respect for it.
Christmas and Easter are both casualties of this process. Though they are observances of the two great events of the Christian calen- dar, the birth of Jesus and his resurrection, they have been overwhelmed and made ridiculous by secular and commercial pressures. The symbol Christmas holds up to the world is a white-bearded elf carrying a Sharper Image catalog, while Easter's totem is a chocolate rabbit.
Christmas, in fact, has grown into the federal government of holidays -- an overgrown cartoon of what it was originally, huge and out of control, exercising an immense and not entirely healthy influence on the national economy.
This distortion has come about in part because in the United States, Christianity is the majority religion in a secular society comprising many faiths, and has been pushed hard from within and without to be more inclusive. But other religions aren't immune to similar erosion. The secularization of Christianity has been noted with alarm by conservative Jews and Muslims, and has made them more wary of such trends in their own faiths.
While making Christmas more accessible to the world has in some very basic ways reduced its importance, what's happened to Thanksgiving is quite the opposite. Thanksgiving, to most Americans the favorite holiday of them all, stands four-square for inclusion. Yet at the same time, and not at all paradoxically, it's built on that most exclusive of institutions, the family.
Thanksgiving is the time of year when Americans travel in gigantic restless herds like migrating caribou. And although the travel- ers may appear to be moving in different directions, the migration consists for the most part of people relentlessly heading "home" -- to wherever their families are gathering. The traveling, and its attendant disruption on roads and in airports, is a national manifestation of what is at heart a powerfully local occasion.
The localness of Thanksgiving seems especially worth emphasizing this year, with the holiday coming less than three weeks after a remarkable election in which Americans declared, among various other things, that with regard to many government functions, local is best.
The election results were a vote of no confidence in the federal government, and by implication a vote of slightly greater confidence in state government. State governments shouldn't get too cocky about that, though, because they may soon find that a lot of people think that much of what they're doing can be done even better.
The reinvigorated doctrine of localism holds that much of what Maryland state government does could be done better, in ways more individually tailored to the needs and desires of the citizens, by the governments of the 23 counties. And in many cases government can be further improved by making it more local still.
About 675,000 of Maryland's 4.7 million residents live in cities, other than Baltimore, or towns. These 154 communities range in size from a few dozen residents to more than 40,000, and the people elected to run them are usually closer to their constituents than the people elected to run the biggest counties. Yes, services cost money, but if you pay for them at the town hall, you're likely to get much greater value for your dollar than if you mail it to Washington or Annapolis and hope some of it comes back.
There used to be a governmen- tal concept called "regionalism" which was highly popular with academics, bureaucrats and others who relish public complexity. It held that government functions, especially those performed by big cities like Baltimore or Washington and their surrounding suburbs, should be "regionalized" -- mostly so that the suburban taxpayers could be made to support the city governments.
Regionalism is dead now, as dead as last Halloween's rotting pumpkins, and localism -- the idea that we can best care for our country and for each other by starting with our own community -- is springing up to take its place. Thanksgiving is the perfect time to appreciate that.
4( Peter A. Jay is a writer and farmer.