Holidays in the Hoosegow: Thanksgiving with Some Not-So-Just Desserts!
Thanksgiving is a state of mind, not place. Even prisoners can be thankful, if not for being prisoners, then perhaps just for the art of being itself.
November 12, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae
I have been hindered from writing a new post this month. This gets a little creepy, so bear with me. On the night of October 31, I was visited in my cell by two brown recluse spiders who were apparently hiding in a shirt that I put on that night because I was cold. Well, so were the spiders and unbeknownst to me they claimed squaters rights to the shirt. Sometime during the night leading to the Solemnity of All Saints, I was bitten twice in the back by two poisonous spiders.
It was a few days before I sought treatment being the stubbornly independent person that I am. Finally the bites evolved into a serious blood infection that now requires all-out war. I now have daily visits to the Medical Unit for wound treatment and new bandaging. I am also on a potent antibiotic. There is some tissue damage. I lost the battle with the spiders, but I am told that I am winning the war thanks to the medical care I am receiving.
The worst part of this whole story was when I told it in a phone call to Pornchai Max Moontri in Thailand, he launched into singing “Itsy, Bitsy Spider.”
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I hope you will read “The True Story of Thanksgiving” posted here every year in late November, this year included. I figure that, in America at least, we eat the same meal every year at Thanksgiving. It is a holiday bound up in traditions. Every year I grimace as the U.S. President pardons a turkey on national television, then gobbles up an already preplucked Butterball in its place for Thanksgiving Dinner. So we added a tradition of our own several years ago, which you will find repeated again this year on the day before Thanksgiving.
Even The Wall Street Journal honors its own Thanksgiving tradition by repeating, on the day before Thanksgiving, the same two editorials at the top of its opinion page. So the message is that repetition is not a bad thing and the story we tell at Thanksgiving is both historically true and spiritually wondrous. Since I first wrote it back in 2010, references to it have appeared in two published history books about the Mayflower Pilgrims. We expect to publish it anew here on Wednesday, November 26.
I hope you will plan to read “The True Story of Thanksgiving: Squanto, the Pilgrims, and the Pope.”
Thanksgiving is a tough sell for most prisoners. It often involves only a litany of losses and discouragement. But I have advocated among other prisoners a more positive approach with some mixed success.
I am not quite ready to give thanks just yet for my 31st Thanksgiving holiday in the hoosegow. But writing this post did make me wonder about the origin of “hoosegow.” The local cable system here carries American Movie Classics (AMC) which broadcasts old westerns on most Saturday mornings. I love John Wayne movies, especially the later ones. It might have been in one of those that I heard Walter Brennan (who, by the way, is from my hometown!) playing a cranky old deputy sheriff.
I can even now hear Walter Brennan threatening to throw someone in the “hoosegow.” Hoosegow has an interesting origin. It comes from the phonetic pronunciation of a Spanish word, “Juzgado,” meaning “courtroom.” It is the past participle of “juzgar,” which in turn came from the Latin “iudicare,” (pronounced, “you-dee-CAR-eh) meaning “judge.” Since judges send people to jail, “juzgado” came to refer to jails and prisons. Then, in the slang of border towns in the American Old West, it became “hoosegow.” So now you know the origin of the word, hoosegow. Don’t thank me just yet!
Here in the hoosegow, like everywhere else in the U.S., we are about to mark Thanksgiving. I would not use “celebrate” to describe how prisoners observe this, or any, holiday. On the whole, prisoners do not really celebrate much. But even here most can find something to be thankful for. I found such a moment several years ago when Pornchai Max and other friends were still here with me. I will even go so far as to say I celebrated it.
The Earth’s journey around our Sun brings about the inevitable changing seasons beyond these stone walls. I have journeyed in life 72 times around our Sun, but most of the fallen citizens around me barely notice the changing world. We venture outside each day among asphalt and steel and high concrete walls with little evidence of the march of time and the changing seasons. The “Field of Dreams” — the prison ball field and the one place with trees in sight — closed for the year two months ago. The only leaves I see now are the very few that the wind carries over the high prison walls which consume my view of the outside world.
One day in autumn some years ago, I turned a corner outside on the long, concrete ramp winding its way up to the prison mess halls. I looked up to discover a spot I never noticed before.
It was a place amid the concrete and steel that afforded a momentary glimpse of a tree-covered hill in the distance beyond the walls, and the rays of the setting sun had fallen upon that very spot. For a moment, the hill was clothed in a blaze of glory with an explosion of fall color. It was magnificent! I felt a bit like Dorothy Gale, stepping for the first time out of the gray gloom of her Kansas home into the startling glory of the Land of Oz.
Prisoners are not permitted to stop and gawk while moving from Point A to Point B, but in two more steps, or a few more seconds, the view would be gone. So I nudged Pornchai and Joseph who were walking with me, and we all stared for a moment in awe. We froze in our tracks for those seconds, risking a guttural shout of “KEEP MOVING!” from one of the guards posted along this via dolorosa.
There was a guard right at that spot, poised to bellow, but then he followed our gaze and he, too, gawked for a moment, keeping his shout to himself. We moved on up the ramp amid all the downcast eyes around us, but saw no evidence that anyone else noticed that scene of radiant beauty beyond these stone walls. I thanked God in silence for nudging me to look up just then. It was proof that a moment for giving thanks presents itself every day, even in this awful place. Those moments will be passed by unnoticed if I am so consumed with grief that I fail to look up and out beyond these stone walls. I have to look up to see. I have to keep my eyes opened, and focus somewhere beyond just me.
I look up at that spot every day now, but the color has faded to a barren gloom, just like life here — or anywhere else — can if I let it. I have learned from Squanto of The Dawn Land that even the worst plight affords an opportunity for thanksgiving. We must not let those moments pass by unnoticed for our very souls depend on them.
I despise this place of captivity where so many of the days given to me have been spent. Really spent! Yet on past Thanksgiving Days, Pornchai, and Joseph, and other friends who walked with us each day, all found a few seats together in the prison chow hall. There we gave thanks for turkey, for an annual piece of pumpkin pie, for friendship found even in the ruins of lives broken and dreams delayed, for laughter in the face of pain, and especially for the gift of bearing one another’s burdens with thanks for the graces given to us.
In a sea of downcast eyes, furtive glances, and foul speech seldom rising above talk of gangs, and drugs, and the exploitation of others, Pornchai showed off his Saint Maximilian medal, and spoke of salvation and sacrifice and the privilege of being Catholic in a truly destitute public square.
In the end, I had been left with no choice and no other prayer to utter: Thank you, Lord, for this day!
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John Wayne and Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo.
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”