HW 18- Health & Illness & Feasting

My experience of Thanksgiving this year was similar to the way I experience it practically every year, and practically every year Thanksgiving is one of the few times of the year that completely fits in to the aspects of our countries practices that relate to physicality. I know for a fact that there are many people that just use Thanksgiving as an excuse to eat as much food as they want and that there are also many that couldn't even explain what the holiday is meant to celebrate. In my family, it feels like Thanksgiving is becoming less and less traditional and cultural and more just about the physicality of eating as much food as we want. For instance, almost every year for this holiday, my parents and I gather with the rest of my family at my aunt and uncle's house. However, this year my parents wanted to go down the block instead to a party where not even they knew many of the people that would be there. There certainly was going to be a lot of food there, however.

Another tradition that my parents and I missed out on with my family was sitting around the TV with everyone and watching football. Although it does not sound like a necessarily thankful thing to do, it has become practically a cultural ceremony in many families across the country, and I'm sure there are many that would argue that it is a good thing to do because football is a very "American" game. These two activities of eating as much food as you can and lying around and watching TV afterwards are not exactly "healthy" things to do, and further represent how the holiday of Thanksgiving is one of the few times where body-centered practices dominate over anti-body practices.

In my opinion, it is not necessarily a bad thing that there is one day every year that is almost completely devoted to body-centered practices, because all the others are practically all connected with the mind. In fact, another way that Thanksgiving reminds us of our physicality is the way many people tend to feel the next day. After such rapid consumption of food that, very often, is not necessarily healthy for you, many people will feel very tired initially after the meal. After a little while, some people will probably experience stomach pain while others might continue to experience fatigue. This idea is similar to what we talked about in class, and how only when a person is ill is when they truly start to consider their physicality. This is yet another reason that represents how Thanksgiving is becoming completely based on body-centered practices over anti-body practices, especially in families like mine.