(George Luxton carving a turkey, 1935. Photo courtesy of the MN Historical Society)
Thanksgiving History |
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(George Luxton carving a turkey, 1935. Photo courtesy of the MN Historical Society) |
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"On Thanksgiving everybody goes to church in the morning, as to have everything out of the way before dinner. Then you come home and hang around a little while and get awful hungry smelling the turkey. After dinner Thanksgiving is over." -unidentified lad in 1896 (quoted from Greninger) |
Thanksgiving, like many holidays, is formed around a story. From childhood we are taught the story of the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, in a new and alien land in which, despite its bountiful nature, they came close to starvation. The Native Indians of the area, however, taught them to grow crops and live off the land. Upon their first harvest, the Pilgrims set aside a day to give thanks for their bountiful harvest, and together with the native Indians, they had a great feast. The factual nature of this account is certainly questionable and yet little is truly known of the first Thanksgiving. In fact, some dispute remains on when exactly the first Thanksgiving occurred. English harvest home traditions are likely predecessors of Thanksgiving. These traditions involved a celebration for bringing in the last crops of the field, and involved feasting. The European Harvest festivals, however, carried with them an emphasis on corn and grain goddesses. The Puritans who arrived at Plymouth did not approve of such festivals, for they considered them to be idolatrous (Santino 1994:170). In their celebration of the harvest in 1621, though, they operated within a long-standing English tradition. The 1621 feast was a celebration of the harvest, the Thanksgiving of 1623, on the other hand, was a religious fasting day, but the two days became synonymous by the late 17th century (Santino 1994: 169-70). Just imagine, we could celebrate Thanksgiving through fasting, rather than feasting. |
"I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of a bad moral character...like those among men who live by...robbing. The turkey...is a much more respectable bird...a true original native of America." -Benjamin Franklin, 1782, wanted the U.S. to adopt the turkey as its national symbol (quoted from Grivetti et al) |
According to Sue Ellen Thompson, there were actually two Thanksgiving celebrations before the one in Plymouth, the first in 1607 when a group of English settlers shared a harvest feast and conducted a prayer meeting with Abenaki Indians (2003). The celebration of 1621, however, is typically considered the first Thanksgiving. Tradition holds that the Plymouth colonists invited ninety guests from the local Wampanoag tribe to feast with them (Grivetti et al 2001: 92). The food eaten on the first Thanksgiving is not decisively known. Some historians claim that no one knows what was eaten on the first Thanksgiving. Others suspect that the “menu” included: venison, wild turkey, wild fowl, bass, cod, and Indian corn or maize (Grivetti et al 2001: 92-3). The Puritans of New England objected to fixed dates for festivals, and their only holidays were special days of prayer or fasting to signify averted disasters (Muir 2004: 194). In the 1640s the people of Connecticut decided that Thanksgiving ought to be an annual celebration, but it was not until the mid-1800s that the holiday became official. In the mid-1800s, Thanksgiving was largely confined to rural New England (Muir 2004: 194). New England homes were well known for the bountiful dinners they served. Women of the household made pies weeks in advance and storekeepers made sure to order extra supplies. Some men in settled areas spent the morning of Thanksgiving hunting or at a turkey shoot. Special foods made their appearance only at Thanksgiving and the largest turkeys were chosen for the holiday feast. The meal lasted up to two hours, and like today, everyone was expected to eat more than his or her fill (Nylander 1993: 274). |
( Turkey race, Thanksgiving Day, Star Tribune Nov.25, 1955. Photo courtesy of the MN Historical Society)
It was not until after the battle of Gettysburg, and twenty years of urging from Sarah Hale, editor of Godey’s Ladies Book, that President Lincoln proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving in 1863. At this time, he sought to reestablish a common tradition for a nation that was splintered by war (Wilson 1991: 23-4). Turkey actually did not become a part of the American Thanksgiving tradition until the 1860s. Turkey did not achieve its prominent status as the centerpiece of the holiday meal until after World War II, when the poultry industry’s aggressive marketing and development of larger hybrid turkeys made the turkey into a symbol of American abundance. Thanksgiving’s of today are marked by a mix of old and new traditions, as many families gather together to eat many of the same foods that their ancestors did. The melting pot of America, though, with influxes of immigrants from all over the world has made for many variations on the traditional Thanksgiving meal. The meals we eat today, are also more likely to come from further away and are processed to a much greater extent than Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries could have understood. |