No. 17 Vol. 11
My Life Publications • 1-800-691-7549
November 2021
Tracing the History of Thanksgiving
T
By Henry M. Holden he annual celebration of Thanksgiving may be America’s most cherished holiday. It stands apart from Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. Thanksgiving also bears a resemblance to the ancient Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot, held in the autumn to commemorate the sheltering of the Israelites in the wilderness. Although Thanksgiving has historical roots in religious and cultural traditions, it has in recent decades, been celebrated as a secular holiday as well. Thanksgiving began as a day of giving thanks and sacrifice for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year. Some evidence indicates that (wild) turkey may have been on the first Thanksgiving menu, but venison, Indian corn and fowl were on the menu, when the Pilgrims hosted the inaugural feast in 1621. Although the American concept of Thanksgiving developed in the colonies of New England, it originated in Europe. Both the religious Separatists and the Puritans who came over on the Mayflower brought with them a tradition of preordained holidays—days of fasting during difficult moments, and days of celebration to thank God for their abundance. Historians have noted that Native Americans had a rich tradition of commemorating the fall harvest with feasting long before Europeans arrived on their shores. A question that is looking for a solid answer is whether the feast at Plymouth was the first Thanksgiving. Some historians have recorded other ceremonies of thanks among European settlers in North America that precede the Pilgrims’ celebration. In 1565, for instance, the Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilé invited members of the local Timucua tribe to a dinner in St. Augustine, Florida, after holding a Mass to thank God for their safe arrival. On December 4, 1619, when 38 British settlers reached a site known as Berkeley Hundred on the banks of Virginia’s James River, they read a proclamation designating the date as “a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”
Puritans felt that they had a direct covenant with God and under siege from Church and Crown, and certain groups migrated to colonies in the New World in the 1620s and 1630s. This led to the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of New England. Native Americans and many other persons take issue with how the Thanksgiving narrative is represented. Christopher Columbus, Juan Ponce de Leon, and Hernando de Soto are three of the many Europeans who plundered the Native American resources and kidnapped many into slavery. In their view, the narrative paints a cunningly disguised picture of relations between the Pilgrims and the Native American people, masking the bloody history of conflict between them resulted in the deaths of thousands. In 1827, the noted magazine editor and prolific writer, Sarah Josepha Hale, author of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” began a campaign to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. For more than 30 years, she published frequent editorials and sent scores of letters to governors, senators, and presidents, earning her the nickname the “Mother of Thanksgiving.” In 1863, Abraham Lincoln, at the height of the Civil War, finally granted her request in a proclamation beseechcontinued on page 4
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