Thanksgiving Tradition Has Deep Roots
November 27, 2013
Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving Day will be the 150th year the holiday has been officially celebrated in the United States. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared the fourth Thursday in November to be day of thanksgiving. Credit for the official, national holiday should go to magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, who had stumped for the holiday for years and finally persuaded Lincoln to act on her idea.
The "first" Thanksgiving was celebrated in Plymouth, in 1621. (An oil painting on canvas from about 1919, by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.—Corbis/Bettmann)
Although the 1863 Thanksgiving was the first official celebration of the national holiday, it honored the Thanksgiving the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony shared with friendly Indians in 1621.
The Pilgrims–English people who immigrated to the new world in 1620 in search of religious freedom–barely survived their first winter in what would come to be called New England. The winter was very harsh, and nearly half of them died. The next spring, the surviving Pilgrims learned–with the help of the an Indian named Tisquantum (Squanto)–how to plant such native crops as corn and pumpkin. (They also planted seeds they brought from England for such crops as wheat and barley.) In the autumn of 1621, the governor of Plymouth, William Bradford, organized a festival to give thanks for the survival of the colony and its first harvest. But, the holiday’s roots go even deeper.
The Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving feast stemmed from a tradition of harvest festivals held by English country folk. On Michaelmas Day (the feast day of St. Michael, September 29), country people would hold a large, communal harvest supper, giving thanks for the crops that would sustain them over the winter. And that tradition, most likely, dates back to at least the Middle Ages, if not even farther.
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