Thanksgiving Day – a festival all Americans hold dear

Posted in America, Anniversary, Customs, Historical articles, History, Religion on Friday, 27 January 2012

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This edited article about American customs originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 618 published on 17 November 1973.

Thanksgiving in the West, picture, image, illustration

Thanksgiving Day way out West in the 1840s by Angus McBride

In New York the crisp bright day has faded into a crisp, starlit evening. In Alaska it is snowing, and has been for days. Los Angeles is smothered in smog. In the deep South summer still lingers.

In New York it is five o’clock. Offices and shops are closing and the rush is on to the railroad stations, airports and freeways. In Alaska and Los Angeles it is still early afternoon, but already there is a steady trickle of traffic from the cities. Railroad stations are thronged. Harassed mothers clutch bulging suitcases, carrier-bags and small, excited children. Breathless dads join them with minutes to spare.

It is the fourth Wednesday in November and all America, it seems, is on the move. But not quite all. At the end of all those journeys is a house where people are “staying put;” where the loads that have been carried throughout the day have been not suitcases, but shopping baskets, loaded with autumn fruit and vegetables. Here the kitchens are humming with activity and warm with delicious smells, for the meal that is being prepared, and will be eaten tomorrow, is the great traditional American feast: Thanksgiving.

This is the day when every American who can, goes home, maybe to the next street to visit parents or grandparents he, or she, meets every day; but perhaps to a family half-a-continent away, unseen for a year. To most Americans it is more important to make this journey for the fourth Thursday in November than it is to be home for Christmas.

It all began more than three centuries ago, when the Pilgrim Fathers, surprised and deeply grateful to find themselves still alive after a hard and perilous year in the New World, gave thanks to God for their survival.

In 1621 Governor William Bradford ordered a three-day festival and one of the Pilgrims, Edward Winslow, wrote a letter describing it:

“Our harvest being gotten in,” he wrote “our Governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week.”

The “fowl” killed on this occasion were the wild turkeys which had helped keep the Pilgrims alive during the first grim winter in America. It was a bird unknown, then, in Europe.

Today, no self-respecting American hostess would serve Thanksgiving Day dinner without a turkey as a central part of the meal, any more than she would think of missing out Pumpkin Pie, another part of that very early Thanksgiving.

Her whole menu now is much richer and more elaborate than the simple meals the Pilgrims served, but she tries always to stick to traditional American dishes, and American ways of serving food: fruit with meat, and a mixture of sweet and sour flavours. Baked ham with raisin sauce is a favourite accompaniment to the turkey. So is cranberry sauce. Garden peas are served with pungent pimentos; and there are sweet potatoes as well as the ordinary kind. Today, though, very few turkeys are freshly shot, the cranberry sauce may be canned or bottled, and the peas deep-frozen!

That very first Thanksgiving dinner was shared with the people who were already in America when the Pilgrims arrived: the Indians. There were ninety of them, Edward Winslow tells us, with “their greatest King, Massasoit.”

For three days they were entertained and feasted, and to keep the party going the Indians brought their own contribution: five deer. It must have been some party!

But to the earnest, God-fearing Pilgrims it was as much a religious ceremony as a banquet. They were truly thankful to God for their survival in a country which, though fruitful and full of promise, was also hostile and dangerous. Many modern Americans go to church on Thanksgiving to renew that gratitude. Special services are held in churches of every faith: special hymns are sung and special prayers are said. But the big mid-day feast is the thing everyone looks forward to.

Perhaps because they were so busy in other ways, the early settlers did not at first make Thanksgiving an annual event, and it was not made a regular national holiday for centuries. Massachusetts Bay Colony’s official celebration was not held until nine years after that first enormous feast, and it did not become an annual custom in Connecticut until 1649, or in Plymouth until 1668. Rhode Island did not join in until the Revolution, but by the end of the 18th century celebrating Thanksgiving had become a regular date in the American calendar, and George Washington proclaimed November 26th, 1789 the first national day of Thanksgiving.

The South, of course, was reluctant to adopt any such ‘Yankee’ custom, but gradually the idea spread, westward at first, carried partly by New Englanders moving away from the eastern seaboard in search of new country to settle; and partly through the enthusiasm of the Editor of a popular women’s magazine: Godey’s Lady’s Book. Through its pages Mrs Sarah J. Hale coaxed the women of America to gather their families round them and feed them traditional American fare on this very American day; and the women of America caught her enthusiasm.

Since the middle of the 19th century Thanksgiving Day has been an annual national holiday in the United States and since 1941 it has been fixed for the fourth Thursday in November. The general atmosphere of Thanksgiving is a warm and happy one. It is a day for making-up quarrels, forgetting family feuds, showing off new grandchildren and generally “going home to mother” in the nicest possible way. And remembering with gratitude the simple courage of the early pioneers who made a new life, in a new country, in a new world.

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