On October 3rd, 1789, George Washington proclaimed that the 26th of November of that year would be the nation’s first official Thanksgiving Day. It had nothing to do with the harvest, and was most likely coincidental that that it happened in November. It was entirely focused on giving thanks to god for blessing the American people with the right to govern themselves and for safe passage through the war with England. And the proclamation was for a single day. There wouldn’t be another Thanksgiving until Washington proclaimed a day of thanks in 1795. For the first 6 decades of America, thanksgiving was celebrated when dictated by Presidents and Governors.
As we all learned in elementary school, the first thanksgiving was convened by the Pilgrims in Massachusetts and was very much a harvest festival. And while this is where we choose to find the origin of our modern holiday, it was decidedly not the first thanksgiving held in America. Virginia colonies, including Jamestown, had been celebrating days of giving thanks for years before the Pilgrims from Plymouth got in on the act. One such colony, the Berkeley Hundred, even had it written in their charter that their day of arrival in the New World would be marked by an annual thanksgiving ceremony, specifically thanking god for their safe passage across the Atlantic.
In trying to make sense of the heritage of our modern-day Thanksgiving holiday, the issue is confused by the very term thanksgiving. The kind of thanksgiving that George Washington proclaimed was of the same provenance as the Berkley Hundred observation. These were fully religious events, where a special point was made of stopping everything and thanking god. They were held periodically to celebrate a victory in battle, a new government, or just to boost the national morale.
When Abraham Lincoln codified Thanksgiving as an annual national holiday occurring on the fourth Thursday in November (he also made his proclamation on October 3, but in 1863) he most certainly had the religious ceremony in mind. However, given the date he chose, the holiday has evolved into a harvest festival. Turkey was added to the menu and football games became a regular component, and combined with the mandatory Thursday date, the event became a spectacle weekend. Now Thanksgiving is a time for families to gather, eat too much turkey and mashed potatoes, watch football, and then start their Christmas (or Hanukah) shopping. I’d wager many Americans wouldn’t identify thanksgiving as a religious event.
When historians looked back to find the origins of our modern celebration, they found the story of a harvest festival in the records of William Bradford’s account of life in the Plymouth Plantation. Bradford didn’t actually call it a thanksgiving ceremony, but its celebration of a successful harvest and having plentiful stores of food corresponds well with today’s holiday. And so a straight line was drawn between the thanksgiving of the pilgrims and our celebration today. Washington almost certainly didn’t have the pilgrims in mind when he proclaimed the first thanksgiving, and likely hadn’t even heard of the pilgrims’ celebration.
There is a danger in studying history and portraying the past for modern observers. One must refrain from viewing the past as an inevitable progression towards today. We have an innate human desire to assign narratives and create tidy stories out of life, but this causes us to simplify our stories in order to make them more effective. It is an utterly romantic notion that Americans have been giving thanks the same way since their very beginnings on this continent, but it is also not true. The thanksgivings that happened between then and now had little to do with this tradition, but our need to see a progression and make sense out of the past has clouded this fact. There is no injustice here, but rather a misunderstanding of our own traditions. And if we fail to understand where our traditions come from, what is the point in having them?
