Happy belated Thanksgiving! Or bah humbug? I always find myself deeply ambivalent around the holiday season.

一方面，感恩节可以是家庭和社区的欢乐庆典。Family connections are inherently valuable, and sincesocial isolation is dangerous, this gives us all the more reason to celebrate and strengthen them.

On the other hand, Thanksgiving festivities can serve to cover up, and encourage, ongoing injustice. American children are told a sanitized story about the first Thanksgiving, in which Native Americans share a peaceful harvest meal with the English Pilgrims (after helpfully teaching the Pilgrims to feed themselves in the New World). This story is true as far as it goes, but omits the less savory details of colonialism.

The man most famous for helping the settlers,Tisquantum(also known as Squanto), was kidnapped by an English explorer, Thomas Hunt, six years before their arrival. Hunt attempted to sell him into slavery, but he escaped and returned home, only to discover that while he was gone, his entire village had been wiped out by an epidemic. European settlement was disastrous for indigenous Americans, who continue to face injustice in the form ofpoverty,mass incarceration,sexual assault, andcontinued theft of land and resources, in the face ofpublic indifference. Taking these facts into account, the happy version of the story starts to look less like a way of bringing people together to live in harmony, and more like whitewashing.

Thanksgiving is also an unhappy day for animals.Blogger Harish at the vegan blog Counting Animals根据美国农业部2015年的统计数据估计，我们每年感恩节杀死约3700万只火鸡，其中大多数是在可怕的条件下工厂化饲养的。

How should we understand Thanksgiving, then? Is it a wholesome celebration of family and connectedness, or a cover-up for continued injustice? Could it somehow be both?

Philosophers draw a useful distinction between accidental and essential properties. Accidental properties ones that can, at least in principle, be lost or gained. Your hair color is an accidental property, because you can dye your hair. Your having (or lacking) older siblings is an accidental property, because while it’s fixed now, you could have had more or fewer older siblings and still been you.

Essential properties, on the other hand, are properties that a thing must have in order to exist. Some philosophers think your family origin is essential to you: someone born of different parents might have looked very similar to you, but they would have had different genes, and they would have been a different person. Others think that rationality is an essential property of humans: an animal like you, but incapable of rational thought, wouldn’t really be you—at best, it would be an empty husk of you.

Now we can ask: which properties are essential to Thanksgiving, and which are merely accidental? If Thanksgiving is essentially linked to oppression, then we should cancel it and replace it with another holiday. But if its links to oppression are merely accidental, we might hope to keep it and change it for the better.

I personally lean towards the view that most things, including holidays, have very few essential properties. You could throw a vegan Thanksgiving feast with sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, egg-free stuffing, and seitan roast; that wouldn’t make it any less of a Thanksgiving feast. You could tell an honest version of the Thanksgiving story,reshaping the narrative.

即使感恩节最糟糕的特性是偶然的，这并不意味着忽视它们就会导致它们消失。偶然属性可以伴随一个事物(或一个假期)的整个生命周期。如果一个偶然的属性足够糟糕，足够难改变，它仍然可以让它的主人无法挽救——一个本质上没有中毒的砂锅仍然可以中毒到不能吃。但如果我是对的，感恩节最糟糕的部分是意外，这意味着至少在理论上有救赎的可能性。如果我错了，感恩节最糟糕的部分对它来说是必不可少的，但这并不意味着家庭节日注定要被取消——我们总是可以选择取消感恩节，在它的位置上创造一个更好、更公正的节日。

ImagebyTyler Amato