Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

Hello, everyone's. Did you have a nice time on Thanksgiving? I'll just call it that. Thanksgiving.

Now, those of you not in America, I have

already deeply offended and I apologize with all my soul because you do not celebrate Thanksgiving on

the day we do. But even for those who do celebrate Thanksgiving, I have a thing or two to say

about it. So I was thinking today about my friend Stephen Mitchell's book,

The First Christmas. This is just out, you guys, and you should go and buy it for your friends.

It's a really, really lovely retelling of the birth of Jesus story, which is interesting because my friend Stephen, who has

translated some of the most beautiful spiritual works in English that are now in English.

I mean, they're beautiful because he put them in English. He was born and raised very Jewish,

and is now kind of Buddhist and kind of just I don't know

agnostic atheist I don't think he'd call himself anything because he doesn't really believe in

stories anymore even though he's telling stories and this is like a really lush rich beautiful

like psychologically insightful book and part of it is from the point of view of

the animals in the stable where Mary and Joseph go. And they all have different perspectives and

different points of view and different stories. And I was thinking about this on Thanksgiving

because one of my children, who is not a child anymore, but always a child to me,

said, why don't we cut out the whole Pilgrims and Puritans thing? Because I'm not so sure I want

to celebrate the forceful eradication, enslavement, and basically the genocide of massive numbers of Native American people.

And I said, you make a solid point.

And they said, why don't we just put all the holidays together and have one huge feast in the wintertime

and putting everything we like and taking everything we

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