The American Thanksgiving Holiday

James W. Baker, Curator, Alden House Historic Site

The popular perception of America's Thanksgiving holiday might be summed up as "it all began with the Pilgrims." After a successful harvest, so the story goes, Governor William Bradford declared an official thanksgiving day in November, 1621 to which Massasoit, the principal sachem of the Wampanoag, was invited. The fifty-or-so Pilgrims who had survived the lethal "First Winter" of 1620/21 and Massasoit, with a royal retinue of 90 men, sat down to a huge outdoor feast prepared by the Pilgrim women. The piece de resistance was of course turkey, but every local foodstuff imaginable was included as well, thus initiating a Thanksgiving tradition of culinary excess that has continued to this day. Like similar legends, the First Thanksgiving has a factual basis in history. The meal, or something like it, did occur, and the attending Indian guests did join the colonists at dinner and in "recreations" over a three-day period. However, those few facts have been so embellished through art, literature and commerce that it is the symbolic connotation of Thanksgiving, not its historical particulars, that shape our understanding of the American holiday.

The "First Thanksgiving" is an etiologic tale, a story told to explain and define the holiday through an account of its alleged origins.

The problem is that historically, the New England Thanksgiving evolved without any association with Pilgrim dinners, Indian guests or harvest celebrations.

Furthermore, identifying the famous Plymouth harvest festival as a thanksgiving, let alone the "First Thanksgiving" is problematic in that it meets none of the qualifications for a legitimate Calvinist thanksgiving. It is only after the holiday had evolved to a sentimental secular occasion in the 19th century that the 1621 event could be seen to resemble a New England Thanksgiving in retrospect. "It was not a thanksgiving at all, judged by their Puritan customs, which they kept in 1621; but as we look back upon it after nearly three centuries, it seems so wonderfully like the day we love that we claim it as the progenitor of our harvest feasts." (DeLoss Love:1895) The successful harvest was indeed a matter for giving thanks and we may assume the colonists did so in the context of their regular Sabbaths and family devotions. There is no indication in the primary sources, however, that the participants considered the 1621 events as a formal thanksgiving.

Far from initiating a tradition or influencing the actual evolution of the New England Thanksgiving, the 1621 harvest celebration was a unique event that had no effect on history until it was recast as a myth of Victorian invention.

Text and picture copied, with permission, from Alden House Historic Site.

[This was the opening reading in the Thanksgiving service of November, 2009. The sermon is Slanting Our Stories.]