Thanksgiving Day History and Myths: It's Not All You Were Taught

Thursday

Nov262009

Today in America it is the Thanksgiving holiday. A day to be thankful.

While I certainly appreciate a day to spend with my husband, kids, and extended family, I don't know that our society needs a whole day set aside to remember to be grateful. Practicing the "concept of Thanksgiving" should be something that we strive for every day.

Photo by *MickyWhatever it is that we are appreciative of and thankful for, I think should be a daily practice. Not in the form of a big feast or a recognized national holiday, but in our everyday actions, the way we treat others, and the appreciation we give to those we encounter and for the lives we lead.

Sure, there is the historical reason behind Thanksgiving, but funny enough, the story that we learned in elementary school (and that continues to be taught today) is far from the correct version of the way the initial gathering went down.

It is common knowledge among academics that the Thanksgiving story of the Indians and the Pilgrims is practically a myth the way it is taught in classrooms today. There are many who have put out pleas to teachers to get the facts straight and include a bit more truth with their lessons, but sadly, it's just "one of those things" that carries on, like most traditions do.

There is much more to read and books-a-plenty on the subject if you want to find out more about the history of this era, but here are a few little tidbits that might surprise you.

Sarah Josepha Hale, the enormously influential magazine editor and author, waged a tireless campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday in the mid-19th century. She was also the author of the classic nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

Wild turkey was never mentioned in the original Thanksgiving account.

Photo by Half ChineseIf cranberries were served, they would have been used for their tartness or color, not the sweet sauce or relish so common today. In fact, it would be 50 more years before berries were boiled with sugar and used as an accompaniment to a meal.

Potatoes weren't part of the feast, either. Neither the sweet potato nor the white potato was yet available to colonists.

The presence of pumpkin pie appears to be a myth too. The group may have eaten pumpkins and other squashes native to New England, but it is unlikely that they had the ingredients for pie crust - butter and wheat flour. Even if they had possessed butter and flour, the colonists hadn't yet built an oven for baking.

The first feast wasn't repeated as an annual occasion and wasn't the beginning of a tradition. In fact, the colonists didn't even call the day Thanksgiving. To them, a thanksgiving was a religious holiday in which they would go to church and thank God for a specific event, such as the winning of a battle. On such a religious day, the types of recreational activities that the pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians participated in during the 1621 harvest feast--dancing, singing secular songs, playing games--wouldn't have been allowed. The feast was a secular celebration, so it never would have been considered a thanksgiving in the pilgrims minds.

The original feast in 1621 occurred sometime between September 21 and November 11 (not the fourth Thursday that is traditionally used as the day of celebration). Unlike our modern holiday, it was three days long. The event was based on English harvest festivals, which traditionally occurred around the 29th of September.

During the American Revolution a yearly day of national thanksgiving was suggested by the Continental Congress. In 1817 New York State adopted Thanksgiving Day as an annual custom, and by the middle of the 19th century many other states had done the same.

In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln appointed a day of thanksgiving as the last Thursday in November, which he may have correlated it with the November 21, 1621, anchoring of the Mayflower at Cape Cod. Since then, each president has issued a Thanksgiving Day proclamation.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt set the date for Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November in 1939 (approved by Congress in 1941)

The attire that we are taught the pilgrims wore is far from what they really dressed like back then. Buckles did not come into fashion until later in the seventeenth century and black and white were commonly worn only on Sunday and formal occasions. Women typically dressed in red, earthy green, brown, blue, violet, and gray, while men wore clothing in white, beige, black, earthy green, and brown.

It is commonly thought that the Mayflower was headed for Virginia, but due to a navigational mistake it ended up in Cape Cod Massachusetts; but the truth is that the Pilgrims were in fact planning to settle in Virginia, but not the modern-day state of Virginia. They were part of the Virginia Company, which had the rights to most of the eastern seaboard of the U.S. The pilgrims had intended to go to the Hudson River region in New York State, which would have been considered "Northern Virginia," but they landed in Cape Cod instead. Treacherous seas prevented them from venturing further south.

Photo dae mon 1Enjoy your meals. Enjoy being with those you love.

Give thanks, appreciation, kindness and love today.

But do it every day.

Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 9:37AM | |

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Reader Comments (3)

Great info! I think that it's cool to have a 'thanksgiving' for family and friends to get together and give thanks for their livelihood, but I definitely think the fictional account of thanksgiving should be thrown out and not be associated with this day. We have veterans day and memorial day, how about a day for the all of the Native Americans who were slaughtered or made slaves? It wouldn't be too hard to drop our 300 billion+ American flags to half staff for a day, would it?

Not angry, just sad about how the story of this day had been twisted. Great blog Jinxi, and great links too!

November 26, 2009 |

Tiger

This is so interesting! I read it to Sam (and Clayton) and we were just amazed at what the real story is! Thank you so much for sharing this Jinxi, doll!