We celebrated Thanksgiving last week, which is my favorite holiday of the year. Not just because it gives me an opportunity to cook (and, if things go right, even show off a little), but also because it’s a holiday dedicated to one of the most important and powerful things in the world, gratitude. Other holidays also have important meanings associated with them, whether it’s the generosity of Christmas or the hope of Easter, or even the high ideals of the Enlightenment enshrined in the Declaration, which we celebrate every Fourth of July. But, to me, gratitude leads the way. It forces us to recognize that most of us have way more blessings than we have woes.
The Pilgrims who partook in the first Thanksgiving were no strangers to woe, half of those who made the trip over on the Mayflower died during a particularly harsh winter in 1620-21. While a few families had been a part of the group that had made the journey, by the end of that deadly winter, only five adult women remained out of the 18 who had made the voyage. By the first Thanksgiving, that number was down to four. Not in spite of those losses, but because of them, at the end of the summer of 1621, which had seen the local Wampanoag tribe show the settlers how to cultivate local crops, including the three sisters - maize, squash, and beans - they came together to give thanks for their harvest. Think about that, despite the fact that they had lost half of the 102 people who had started the trip with them, wives, sons, daughters, brothers, fathers, they still found it in their hearts to be grateful for what they had. If they could then, we certainly can now.
Of course, our Thanksgivings look very different to that first feast in the fall of 1621. Pro football wouldn’t be played on Thanksgiving until 1934 and there were no recliners to lean back and nap in after the feast. The holiday is less religious now for most people than it would have been in Plimoth (the Pilgrims’ spelling). But, at the heart of it, the purpose of the feast remains, to give thanks for our blessings and to recognize just how much we have to be grateful for.
Even our feast looks different than that first one. There was probably no turkey or potatoes, they would have had cranberries but would not have had sugar to sweeten them, there would have been no pumpkin pies because there would have been no butter or flour. Still, wild game was probably served with some of that year’s harvest. Even with the harvest, food was still scarce, they were grateful to have survived, but they knew that many trials and tribulations still lay ahead. Despite that, primary sources tell us that the celebration lasted three days and included 52 settlers and 90 Wampanoag Native Americans. After that first one, there are no accounts of it becoming a continuing tradition until much later.
The modern Thanksgiving has its roots in the 1850s with a woman named Sara Josepha Hale. Hale was the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which she filled with recipes and imaginative tales about the Pilgrims. It was Hale who convinced President Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. A tradition continued after that in which each president would issue a proclamation declaring that year’s Thanksgiving. However, on December 26, 1941, just three weeks after the United States had entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared Thanksgiving to be a yearly national holiday on the fourth Thursday of November. The move to the fourth Thursday from the last Thursday (which are only different in years where there are five) was to give merchants a longer selling season before Christmas during the Great Depression, something that was tremendously controversial at the time.
Think about that, every major development in the holiday that we know today was surrounded by tragedy: war, economic depression, hardships. But those who came before us prevailed, and part of what gave them the strength to overcome those difficult times was gratitude. We face our own obstacles in this moment, a nation divided, the rise of political violence, inflation continues to eat into our wages, but if you were lucky enough to have people around your table last week, or to sit around someone else’s table, then you have so much to be grateful for. What could be a better remedy for what ails us as a nation than sitting around the table, even with people who voted for someone else, especially with people who voted for someone else, breaking bread, taking stock of our blessings, and being thankful?