Turkey?

We don't normally celebrate Thanksgiving here in our house in Oxfordshire, England - not through any special laziness, but it would not be simple. It is a normal working and school day here, and more importantly, so is the next one, a Friday. It coincides with a plethora of family birthdays in the preceding and following weeks, so we have already had whatever excuses we needed for get-togethers. With two kids away at University, these are a challenge. The longer and more languid Christmas break in a few short weeks beckons, when turkey is again the featured dish on Christmas Day. In effect, Thanksgiving is rather superfluous.

But Norman Rockwell's Freedom From Want, a 1943 Saturday Evening Post cover can still inspire some pangs of longing for a special kind of Americana.

This picture is one of the Four Freedoms series inspired by a January 1941 speech by Franklin Roosevelt:

In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look
forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

Plus c'est la meme chose, plus ça change. Thanksgiving weekends too, hopefully. Trust you had a great one.