Happy Turkey Day!
In the witchcraft community, especially among those of us who lean a little darker, we talk a lot about the “Thinning of the Veil.” Usually, people associate this with Samhain (Halloween), but I’ve always felt it lingers right through November.
Thanksgiving is loud. It’s football, clinking silverware, and too many conversations happening at once. But if you listen closely, there is a silence underneath the noise. It’s the silence of the Empty Chair.
Whether you set a physical place at the table for a passed loved one (a tradition known as the Dumb Supper) or just hold space for them in your heart, this holiday is deeply rooted in Ancestor Veneration. It’s about looking back at the line of people who made your existence possible.
But as an ML student, I don’t just see ghosts. I see Legacy Code.
We Are Running on an OS We Didn’t Write
In software engineering, “Legacy Code” refers to source code inherited from someone else. It’s the old foundation that the entire system runs on. It’s vital, it’s powerful, and it usually works—but it’s often undocumented, difficult to change, and written in a language we don’t fully speak anymore.
Our ancestors are the original developers. They wrote the initial operating system of our DNA. They coded our survival instincts, our physical traits, and our emotional baselines.
When we sit down for Thanksgiving, we are acknowledging that the current version of “Me v4.0” is running on a backend built by “Grandma v1.0.”
Inheriting Technical Debt
Here is where the shadow work begins. Legacy code isn’t perfect. It often comes with what we call Technical Debt—quick fixes and messy patches that were necessary at the time but cause problems later.
- Maybe your grandfather had to be hard, cold, and shut down to survive a war or poverty. That was a necessary security patch for his environment.
- But now, you’ve inherited that code. You find yourself shutting down emotionally when things get tough.
That is a bug. It’s a deprecated function running in a modern environment where it’s no longer needed.
In therapy, we call this Generational Trauma. In my world, it’s just bad code documentation. We find ourselves executing loops—arguments, fears, scarcity mindsets—simply because they are hardcoded into the system we inherited.
Refactoring the Lineage
So, how do we honor the ancestors without repeating their bugs? We do what any good engineer does: We Refactor.
We don’t delete the whole repository. We don’t throw away the history. We review the code.
This Thanksgiving, look at your traditions and your family dynamics like a Code Review.
- Keep the features that work: The gumbo recipe? Stable build. Keep it. The way we laugh at our own mistakes? High-performance feature. Keep it.
- Debug the crash reports: The passive-aggressive comments about weight? Bug. The need to drink to tolerate feelings? Critical error.
Honoring your ancestors doesn’t mean blindly executing their program. It means having enough respect for the software to update it.
The Developer is You
This Thursday, when you look at that empty chair or think of those who aren’t there, send them gratitude. Thank them for the initial build. Thank them for surviving long enough to ship the product (you).
But remember: You are the current Maintainer. You have admin privileges. You can rewrite the loops. You can patch the security flaws. You can document the new rules.
So eat the pie, pour a libation for the ghosts, and then get back to work. You’ve got some debugging to do.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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