Jennifer Eastman Attebery
Jennifer Eastman Attebery
Jennifer Eastman Attebery is professor of English at Idaho State University, where she teaches folklore and also chairs the Department of English and Philosophy. She has twice enjoyed sojourns in Sweden, in 1988 as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at University of Gothenburg and in 2011 as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at Uppsala University. Attebery is the author of Up in the Rocky Mountains: Writing the Swedish Immigrant Experience. Her studies of Swedish culture in the Rocky Mountain West have also been published in Scandinavian Studies and Swedish-American Historical Quarterly.
What Happens to a Holiday When It Becomes Dislocated from Its Seasonal Anchor?
I experienced just that recently on a vacation in Australia over the Thanksgiving (in the USA) holiday. First, Thanksgiving didn’t exist, and even more confusing was the feast of gratitude’s calendrical anchor: was it appropriate to give thanks on the fourth Thursday in November or on the day our families would celebrate in the USA, which was Friday?