Ah, Thanksgiving. That most unusual of holidays, one that is still celebrated for its original purpose. Santa and the Easter Bunny may have pushed the religious roots of Christmas and Easter to the sideline in much of the public consciousness, and Memorial Day’s original purpose as a day to visit the graves of soldiers killed in action has been all but obliterated with a flurry of picnics, but Thanksgiving stubbornly remains as it was intended: a day to give thanks for one’s blessings.
Harvest feasts have long been a part of agricultural societies, and in Judeo-Christian thought offering thanks to God for the harvest began with Cain and Abel. No surprise than that the devout Pilgrims merged the two concepts and recognized a day of thanksgiving after their first harvest in October of 1621. The tradition would continue throughout the colonial era, and in 1789, George Washington would issue the first presidential proclamation of a day of thanksgiving. Abraham Lincoln is responsible for the traditional observance of the holiday in late November, but the holiday had no fixed date until a controversy during the Great Depression.
Each year the President was expected to issue a proclamation setting the date for the observance of Thanksgiving. It was understood that the date was always to be the last Thursday in November, which was faithfully observed until 1939, when the last Thursday happened to fall on November 30th. Because even then the day after Thanksgiving was recognized as the start of Christmas shopping season, store owners were concerned about losing money from an abbreviated shopping season and petitioned Franklin Roosevelt to make the holiday the second-to-last Thursday, giving a whole extra week for holiday sales.
FDR did so, and promptly set off a storm of controversy. It seems quaint looking back on it from eighty years, but this was a Very Big Deal at the time, and may have been the first case of a civic holiday taking on a partisan tone. Many Republican households chose to celebrate on the 30th, scorning the 23rd of November as “Franksgiving”. Some state governors even refused to change the date to match the Presidential proclamation, which resulted in a Connecticut native attending college in New York to write the following to the White House:
“Your recent decision to change the date of our Thanksgiving Day has just taken effect here at Pratt Institute. Our directors announced that our school vacation would begin on the twenty-third of November and last until the twenty-sixth because New York, being your home state, is abiding by your decision. However, where I come from, Connecticut, they’ll be observing it on the thirtieth of November as usual. Really, this situation makes my heart ache because I love our Thanksgiving Holidays as much if not a bit more than our Christmas Holidays.” – Miss Eleanor Lucy Blydenburgh, October 18, 1939
After two more years of partisan hot potato (hot candied sweet potato?) with Democrats celebrating on the second-to-last Thursday and Republicans celebrating on the last Thursday, Congress finally settled the matter by defining Thanksgiving as the FOURTH Thursday in November starting in 1942, where it has stayed ever since.
Any controversy about the date aside, I agree with Miss Blydenburgh: I think Thanksgiving might be my favorite holiday. I grew up with Norman Rockwell level Thanksgiving celebrations: 4 extra leaves in the dining room table and 4 generations of family gathered around a turkey only slightly smaller than a Macy’s Parade float. In the 2000s, that’s a bit unusual, and is one of the things I have always had a reason to be thankful for. For over twenty years of my life, I got to celebrate every Thanksgiving with all four of my grandparents, usually some of my uncles, aunts, and cousins, and even a great-great-aunt or two.
Close families are a blessing, and the most fortunate people in the world are those who don’t realize it for a very long time. As a child, it never occurred to me that not everyone got to see such a large percentage of their family tree in the same room at once.
Thanksgiving truly is a family holiday. I don’t know why, but it is. There’s been a great deal of sitcom hay made out of the fact that “Friendsgivings” are not the same as a family Thanksgiving. Every family has its own traditions, and sometimes those traditions sound a bit strange to everyone else. Like my friend who associates prime rib with Thanksgiving, or people who serve macaroni and cheese with their turkey.
(My family’s quirk is making the stuffing into balls so everyone has a neat portion instead of needing to excavate a pile of the stuff from the posterior of the noble fowl.)
I think Thanksgiving improves with age. For one thing, when you cook for yourself you start to appreciate the effort involved in a multi-course meal. Also, adults get the fun of bringing their own signature dish and helping extend the tradition for the next generation. Unlike Christmas, which can grow into a stressful month of attempting to create a perfect holiday, Thanksgiving manages to remain an actual holiday: a day off to celebrate.
I hope Thanksgiving never goes away or gets buried between Halloween (which is becoming more and more a bacchanalian holiday for grownups) and the consumerist behemoth of December. Counting one’s blessings around a dinner table is the true most wonderful time of the year.
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