A Brit’s Ode to Thanksgiving

Other people’s festivals and holidays are enthralling. I have found it a very special privilege to be in Jerusalem on the Sabbath, or in Cairo on a Friday morning. Simply to feel the common agreement to behave differently on this day is a key to a world I do not know. In both cases, the comfortable, relaxed, utter silence beating against your bedroom window is powerful enough to waken the traveler early from sleep. It also evokes, in an Englishman of my age, buried memories of my own country when it took more account of such things, the wet black skies of Protestant Sundays, severe and restrained, silence broken only by church bells. Then there are the giant events, such as Revolution Day in the Soviet Union, a vast ceremony in praise of the tank, the intercontinental ballistic missile, and, of course, that fiend out of hell, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. I saw the last of these in November 1990, freezing under my fur hat on Red Square in Moscow, and having no idea that there would never be any more.