Should’ve let ’em die.

Hindsight’s 20/20, but my goodness did Ousamequin make a mistake 400 years ago when he rescued a band of ignorant settlers from starving, a favor the settlers later repaid by committing genocide.

It was Walter Map, a medieval courtier, who coined the earliest version of the phrase “no good deed goes unpunished,” flipping conventional morality on its head in the 12th century.

The Wampanoag never read Map’s De nugis curialium. If they had, they might’ve known better than to teach the Pilgrims at Plymouth the skills they needed to survive in the new world.

Instead, four-dozen pale-faces had a decent harvest in 1621, and they celebrated by inviting the beneficent natives to lunch. It was all smallpox from there.

Relax, white man, I’m kidding. Not really, though. We murdered those people, and then everybody who looked like them from sea to shining sea, manifesting our destiny to pillage and plunder a paradise in the name of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. You gotta love it.

And we do love it. So much so, in fact, that we take a day off every year to celebrate our conquest with turkey, canned gravy and, in keeping with what Ousamequin would’ve wanted, pro football. It’s a solemn tradition.

Another version of Thanksgiving — the story we tell our children and, too often, ourselves — says it’s a day when families gather joyously at tables around the country to express gratitude for kinship and the myriad blessings associated with living in an advanced economy, a tradition loosely related to a jointly-held banquet at which Native Americans and European settlers celebrated peaceful coexistence. That version’s a lie, but so’s everything we tell ourselves and our children.

Whichever version of Thanksgiving you espouse, you’ll have Thursday off and probably Friday too. Friday is when Americans gather at local big box stores to engage in ceremonial combat to determine who gets a limited supply of cheap televisions and gadgets. (Honor the natives. Wear war paint and bring your bow and arrow.)

There are two notable US government macro releases this week: Retail sales and PPI, both for September and both due on Tuesday. Consensus is looking for a 0.4% advance from the nominal spending print.

An as-expected readout would mark the fourth straight monthly gain for retail sales.

It’s hard to know how to frame that release. Ostensibly it’s an important input but, again, it’s for September. We’re a week away from December. This is a print from Q3. We’re closer to New Year’s than we are to last quarter.

Of course, we still don’t know what GDP was in Q3, so you could argue this release is helpful to the extent the control group helps economists “refine” their forecasts for last quarter’s growth but… well, you get the idea. These readouts are so stale, and we’re missing so many of them, that it’s hard to discuss the government data with a straight face.

As for the September PPI report, it’s useful only because it can help economists formulate a guesstimate for September core PCE, another missing report with no scheduled release date.

Also on deck ahead of the holiday (in order of importance): Conference Board confidence, ADP’s weekly private sector hiring update, jobless claims, pending and new home sales, and house prices.

Spare a thought for Native Americans this week. While you’re eating yourself to sleep in a McMansion, they’ll be drinking themselves to death on a reservation. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure which of those fates is actually worse.