Thanksgiving: The Buried Holiday
The fact that Thanksgiving was made a national holiday for wartime morale is very often overlooked... The fourth Thursday of November was nothing special until 1863.
By: Craig Bergquist
It is an opportunity to spend time with the family and an excuse to make a nice meal. It is an occasion where everyone can enjoy a tradition of food and be content with the country for at least one day in the year. The culture of cornucopias and happy natives eating pilgrims food is one that is ingrained in the holiday as deeply as Santa is to Christmas, but is may surprise you to know that this is a recent addition.
Thanksgiving as we know it did not exist for the pilgrims. In fact, the pilgrims were starving, and the winter was hitting them hard. It was the natives that had all of the food, and it was the natives that taught them how to grow in the temperamental New England soil and how to prepare the local foods.
The picture that is painted by all of our traditional thanksgiving advertisements and culture could not be more wrong. The Native Americans had held annual harvest celebrations for generations, long before the pilgrims arrived on their shores. The Americans would steal the idea from the Natives and call it Thanksgiving. It was not an idea that the settlers came up; it was a day when the Natives feeding the starving colonists.
The fact that Thanksgiving was made a national holiday for wartime morale is very often overlooked.. The fourth Thursday of November was nothing special until 1863.
In 1863, the Civil war had been raging on for two years, and the bitter cold of winter was setting in. The Union troops needed something to lift their spirits. Abraham Lincoln had just the thing; a new national holiday. It promoted nationalism and a renewed sense of spirit among the troops.
As pointed out by James Lowen in his book, Lies my Teacher Told Me: “The Pilgrims had nothing to do with it; not until the 1890s did they even get included in the tradition. For that matter, no one used the term Pilgrims until the 1870s.”
The Thanksgiving tradition and the “holiday season” is something that has largely been accelerated by the media. With the ease of advertising and the idea of an entire season devoted to shopping, it is not hard to see why retailers would want to support Thanksgiving. Not only do they enjoy the jump in the sale of turkeys, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pies, but also greeting cards, dried corn, even plane tickets. We are brainwashed straight up through elementary school with hand turkeys and Popsicle stick pilgrims. It is a tradition that the media is more than happy to promote, because they make a killing, and we smile all the way.
The idea that the tradition of Thanksgiving has been passed down hundreds of years is ridiculous. The holiday we celebrate today is rooted in hundreds of years of fabrication along with half a century of advertising campaigns, and it is important to embrace that. Thanksgiving as a national holiday is a great chance to spend time with your family, reconnect with people, be proud to be an American and eat good food. I think that is enough of a holiday in itself.
