"Thanksgiving Day is celebrated in the United
States on the fourth Thursday of November.
Most people celebrate Thanksgiving by gathering with
family or friends for a holiday feast. Thanksgiving was first celebrated by
Pilgrims and Native Americans in colonial New England in the early 17th century.
Its actual origin, however, probably traces to harvest festivals that have been
traditional in many parts of the world since ancient times. Today
Thanksgiving is mainly a celebration of domestic life, centered on the home and
family.
Public observances of Thanksgiving usually
emphasize the holiday’s connection with the Pilgrims. Thanksgiving pageants and
parades often feature children dressed in Pilgrim costume, complete with bonnets
or tall hats, dark clothes, and shoes with large silver-colored buckles.
Many of the images commonly associated with
Thanksgiving are derived from much older traditions of celebrating the autumn
harvest. For example, the cornucopia (a horn-shaped basket overflowing with
fruits and vegetables) is a typical emblem of Thanksgiving abundance that
dates to ancient harvest festivals. Many communities also decorate their
churches with fruits, flowers, and vegetables at Thanksgiving, much as
European communities have for centuries during the autumn harvest season.
In keeping with the idea of celebrating a
plentiful harvest, preparing and eating a large meal is a central part of
most Thanksgiving celebrations.
Thanksgiving menus usually include turkey,
bread-crumb stuffing, cranberry sauce, squash, mashed potatoes, sweet
potatoes, and pumpkin pie. These simple foods recall the rustic virtues of
the Pilgrims. Additionally, most of these foods are native to North America,
emphasizing the natural bounty that greeted early settlers in their adopted
homeland. Later groups of immigrants to North America often adapted the
traditional holiday menu to fit their own tastes. For example, many Italian
American Thanksgiving meals include Italian specialties, such as pasta and
wine. Long before Europeans settled in North America, western
Europeans observed Harvest Home festivals to celebrate the successful completion
of gathering-in the season’s crops. In the British Isles, Lammas Day (Loaf Mass
Day), observed on August 1, was often held to celebrate a good wheat harvest. If
the wheat crop was disappointing, the holiday was usually canceled.
Another important precursor to the modern Thanksgiving holiday was the custom
among English Puritans of designating special days of thanksgiving to express
gratitude for God’s blessings. These observances were not held regularly; they
usually took place only in times of crisis or immediately after a period of
misfortune had passed. Puritan thanksgiving ceremonies were serious religious
occasions and bore only a passing resemblance to modern Thanksgiving
celebrations. According to tradition, the first American Thanksgiving was
celebrated in 1621 by the English Pilgrims who had founded the Plymouth Colony,
now in the state of Massachusetts. The Pilgrims marked the occasion by feasting
with their Native American guests—members of the Wampanoag tribe—who brought
gifts of food as a gesture of goodwill. Although this event was an important
part of American colonial history, there is no evidence that any of the
participants thought of the feast as a thanksgiving celebration. Two years
later, during a period of drought, a day of fasting and prayer was changed to
one of thanksgiving because rains came during the prayers. Gradually the custom
prevailed among New Englanders to annually celebrate Thanksgiving after the
harvest.
Colonial governments and, later, state governments took up the Puritan custom of
designating thanksgiving days to commemorate various public events. Gradually
the tradition of holding annual thanksgiving holidays spread throughout New
England and into other states. During the American Revolution (1775-1783) the
Continental Congress proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving following the
American victory at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. U.S. President George
Washington proclaimed another day of thanksgiving in 1789 in honor of the
ratification of the Constitution of the United States. In 1817 New York State
adopted Thanksgiving Day as an annual custom, and many other states soon did the
same. Most of the state celebrations were held in November, but not always on
the same day.
In the mid-19th century Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Ladies Book, led a
movement to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. In 1863, during the
American Civil War (1861-1865), President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last
Thursday in November Thanksgiving Day in order to bolster the Union’s morale.
After the war, Congress established Thanksgiving as a national holiday, but
widespread national observance caught on only gradually. Many Southerners saw
the new holiday as an attempt to impose Northern customs on them. However, in
the late 19th century Thanksgiving’s emphasis on home and family appealed to
many people throughout the United States. As a distinctly American holiday,
Thanksgiving was also considered an introduction to American values for the
millions of immigrants then entering the country.
During the 20th century, as the population of the United States became
increasingly urban, new Thanksgiving traditions emerged that catered to city
dwellers. The day after Thanksgiving gradually became known as the first day of
the Christmas shopping season. To attract customers, large retailers such as
Macy’s in New York City and Gimbel’s in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, began to
sponsor lavish parades. By 1934 the Macy’s parade, featuring richly decorated
floats and gigantic balloons, attracted more than one million spectators
annually.
The custom of watching football games on Thanksgiving Day also evolved during
the early decades of the 20th century. As football became increasingly popular
in the 1920s and 1930s, many people began to enjoy the holiday at a football
stadium. Teams in the National Football League eventually established traditions
of playing nationally televised games on Thanksgiving afternoon.
In 1939 U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt shifted the day of Thanksgiving from
the last Thursday in November to one week earlier. Retail merchants had
petitioned the president to make the change to allow for an extra week of
shopping between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Many Americans objected to the
change in their holiday customs and continued to celebrate Thanksgiving on the
last Thursday of the month. Roosevelt’s political opponents in Congress also
opposed the break with tradition and dubbed the early holiday “Franksgiving.” In
May 1941 Roosevelt admitted that he had made a mistake and signed a bill that
established the fourth Thursday of November as the national Thanksgiving
holiday, which it has been ever since.
Thanksgiving is also a legal holiday in Canada. Because Canada is north of the
United States, its harvest comes earlier in the year. Accordingly, the
Thanksgiving holiday falls earlier in Canada than in the United States. The
Canadian Parliament set aside November 6 for annual Thanksgiving observances in
1879. In 1957 the date was shifted to an even earlier day, to the second Monday
in October."1
