Thanksgiving
Map of Wampanoag village at Plymouth Bay in 1613 AD,
just before the Puritans arrived. See the growing
crops around each house?
Beginning about 100 AD, when they started farming their food, all throughout the middle and eastern parts of North America, people celebrated the Green Corn Ceremony every fall when the corn got ripe. This was a harvest festival, like the harvest festivals all farming people have in the fall all over the world. At the Green Corn Ceremony, people thanked the corn gods for a good harvest, and ate lots of food, especially corn.
George Washington proclaims a day of Thanksgiving (1789)
When Christian European settlers first came to North America in the 1500s AD, local people taught the settlers to grow corn and squash and beans too, and the settlers also held harvest feasts in the fall to thank their God and to feast on the good food.
In November 1621, when the settlers at Plymouth had been in America almost a year, they decided to hold a feast with the local Wampanoag people to celebrate their first harvest. They didn't call this a Thanksgiving, just a feast. At this feast, the settlers and Wampanoag people ate corn, and squash, and beans, just as people always had at the Green Corn Ceremony. They ate other local foods, like onions, cranberries, ducks, turkey, oysters, clams, and venison (deer meat). Like the Green Corn Ceremony, this feast went on for several days. The settlers had run out of sugar, and had no ovens, so there were no pies, but they might have had berries for dessert.
All through the 1600s, people - Iroquois, Cherokee, English, French, or Spanish - continued to hold harvest festivals in the fall all over eastern and southern North America. People also held Thanksgiving holidays now and then. These Thanksgivings meant thanking the Christian God at church services. They didn't have a regular schedule, just whenever something good had happened. Gradually people began to combine these two ideas and to have a Thanksgiving feast every year in the fall. People continued to eat mostly North American food at their Thanksgiving feast - sweet potatoes, cornbread, pigeon pie, maple syrup, squash and pumpkin, potatoes, greens, and cranberries, though they added some European fall harvest foods the settlers had brought to North America, especially apples and apple cider, and they gradually replaced most of the maple syrup with sugar.
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In the 1700s, most of the thirteen colonies had Thanksgiving feasts at least once a year, sometimes more than once. The governor of each colony decided when to celebrate Thanksgiving. But in 1817, the governor of New York State decided to make Thanksgiving an official holiday on the same day every year. During the 1800s, more and more people started to have turkey for Thanksgiving. Other north-eastern states began to have official Thanksgiving holidays too, though not all on the same day. In the South, most states didn't celebrate Thanksgiving at all, and in the northwest, where people like the Chinook and the Shoshone and Blackfoot didn't farm, nobody celebrated Thanksgiving either.
Sarah Hale
But the Civil War in the 1860s made the United States government much less willing to let states decide things for themselves. In 1863, in response to a campaign by the anti-slavery activist Sarah Hale, President Lincoln announced that the whole United States would celebrate Thanksgiving together on the last Thursday in November. The southern states, which considered themselves independent, ignored this law. Even after they lost the Civil War in 1865, for decades many southern people refused to celebrate Thankgiving, because it was a northern and anti-slavery holiday. In the last part of the 1800s, as the European settlers moved west and forced more and more people on to reservations and began farming the land, people in the western part of North America also slowly began to celebrate Thanksgiving. As the holiday moved west, and farther from the ocean, oysters and clams gradually dropped off the menu.
Kids in Thanksgiving costumes (New York City, 1933)
Beginning about 1900, city mayors tried to stop people from mumming at Christmas. As a result kids began to celebrate Thanksgiving by going trick-or-treating from house to house, the way you do now on Halloween. During the 1930s and 1940s, school principals and other officials worked hard to make Thanksgiving more of a family holiday. They gradually got kids to move their trick-or-treating to Halloween.
Lincoln's idea of the last Thursday in November lasted until 1941, when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to celebrate a little earlier, the next-to-last Thursday in November, to allow more time for Christmas shopping after Thanksgiving and encourage recovery from the Depression. People complained so much that he had to move it to the fourth Thursday in November. That's when the United States celebrates Thanksgiving now. In Canada, where winter comes earlier, Thanksgiving is also earlier, on the second Monday of October.
While many Native Americans continue to celebrate the Green Corn Ceremony, and others celebrate Thanksgiving, beginning in 1970, some Wampanoag and other Native American people began to observe a National Day of Mourning instead of Thanksgiving. They wanted to remind people how their land was stolen by the white settlers they tried to help.
To find out more about Thanksgiving, check out these books from Amazon or from your local library:
Puritans
Quakers
Ghost Dancers
Mormons
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