Recently got a slew of email of the Let's Celebrate Thanksgiving Day variety. A girl I know insists that we take pause in consideration of this "special day." Now this would have been fine if I were American, or living in the States or in any of the temperate zones. As it is, I don't consider it a special day that requires religious or national celebration. Thanksgiving is an American holiday of the WASP kind. As far as I know, I'm no White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I'm descended from a line of working class Pinoys, no hypens included. None of them ever came close to the Mayflower. We don't share the same cultural symbolisms with Americans. It's like snow. No matter how many times you watch Home Alone or Holiday on Ice Castles, or dream of a White Christmas, you can't and won't ever appreciate the codified reaction of someone who has actually experienced snow. We can watch the movie, sing the song, but there is no shared cultural memory, no experience of snow. We live in a tropical country with no snow and no raspberries.* We don't really eat turkey. Therefore it makes no sense for me to partake of turkey and cranberry sauce.

The natural rebuttal to this would be to trot out the old globalisation bit. We all live in one giant global village blah blah. But what does that mean? If you try to be a citizen of the world, disregarding all cultural, social and economic boundaries, what's left is a hodgepodge of people who don't know exactly who they are. In a time when everyone's being pushed to be a cultural sponge, it becomes necessary to retain a distinct national identity. Know their holidays, their language, their pop culture references, their excesses. But I draw the line at celebrating Thanksgiving. To do so would be to bow to cultural imperialism. Or as a guy friend pointed out: We're brown; and they ain't our forefathers. What I really want to say is: Why would I want to take part in a celebration that has no meaning for me? So they can sell me Hallmark cards?

[The snow explanation came from poet-critic Isagani Cruz in one of his columns somewhere. The "no snow and no raspberries" bit is from Butch Dalisay's Killing Time In A Warm Place.]