Thanksgiving. Melanie Kirkpatrick
Statutes regulating Thanksgiving Day behavior were still in force in New England in the nineteenth century, though the pillory’s days were past. In 1825, a Connecticut man named Gladwin contested the service of a civil process on Thanksgiving Day. He argued that the constable’s delivery of the writ was invalid since there was a law against working on Thanksgiving. The state supreme court agreed. In support of its ruling, the court cited the state statute pertaining to days of thanksgiving: “All persons shall abstain from every kind of servile labour and vain recreation, works of necessity and mercy excepted.” The service of a civil process, the court ruled, was neither a work of necessity nor an act of mercy. Gladwin won his case.16
It is impossible to know precisely when the feasting and family aspects of Thanksgiving Day began to overtake the religious ones, but the trend appears to have started toward the end of the seventeenth century. That is when Thanksgiving dinner grew in importance in New England, “adding homecoming relatives, extra pies and platters of roast meat,” in the words of the historian Diana Karter Appelbaum. Churches accommodated the custom of a festive dinner by eliminating the afternoon service on Thanksgiving Day, “first in the country districts where the walk to meeting was long and cold,” Appelbaum writes, “then in 1720 in Boston itself.” Soon Thanksgiving dinner was nearly as important as the morning prayer service.17
Thanksgiving wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without someone lamenting this trend and calling on Americans to focus their attention less on feasting and more on giving thanks. In 1792, the Connecticut Courant published a letter from a man complaining that Thanksgiving had become a day devoted to eating and drinking.18 In 1873, an article published in the Boston Daily Globe on the day after Thanksgiving bemoaned the decline in the religious character of the day: “The views of our Puritan ancestors in regard to attendance on divine worship were disregarded . . . but the revered turkey was trotted out with all the alacrity which good housewives are wont to expect.”19 In 1926, an editorial in an educational journal complained that “The religious significance of the day touches many not at all, the historical significance is quite forgotten. . . . Are we so self-sufficient that gratitude and acknowledgement are inappropriate?”20
Still, the religious aspects of the holiday continue to touch many Americans today. Chances are good that before you begin your Thanksgiving dinner, you pause for a moment or more to give thanks. For many Americans, perhaps most, giving thanks means saying a prayer. On an ordinary day, 44 percent of Americans say grace before eating, according to one survey. Another 44 percent of Americans report they almost never say grace—a response that implies they do so on special occasions such as Thanksgiving Day.21 Almost every religion practiced in the United States encourages the celebration of Thanksgiving. One exception is Jehovah’s Witnesses, who do not celebrate any holiday that is not based on the Bible.
Americans are a religious people—a strong majority profess a belief in God—and on Thanksgiving Day, they usually express their gratitude to the Almighty in whatever form that being takes shape in their faith. While the custom of attending religious services on Thanksgiving Day has long since lapsed, and the holiday is not tied to any particular religion, for many Americans the opening words of the old Thanksgiving hymn still apply: “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessings.”
Nonreligious Americans find secular ways to express gratitude. Some families go around the Thanksgiving table asking each person, young and old, to name something for which he or she is grateful. Others pause to express gratitude to the cooks who made the meal, the farmers who grew the food, the love of family and friends, the blessings of liberty, or simply for their general good fortune. For the late author Ayn Rand, an atheist, the essential meaning of Thanksgiving was “a celebration of successful production.” The lavish meal, she wrote, is “a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America’s pride—just as it is the pride of American parents that their children need never know starvation.”22
In his lovely little book The Thanksgiving Ceremony, published in 2003, Edward Bleier, a Jew and the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, describes a ritual he composed for use around the Thanksgiving table.23 Bleier’s twenty-minute ceremony acknowledges God but is nonsectarian. The ceremony is inspired by the Passover Seder, which celebrates the Jews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt as told in the biblical book of Exodus. The Thanksgiving Ceremony recounts the Pilgrim story, and includes brief readings from the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, a speech by Martin Luther King, and other notable American texts. It concludes with the singing of “America the Beautiful.”
Bleier’s Thanksgiving ceremony reflects another aspect of Thanksgiving Day gratitude that has become part of the holiday: love of country. Since the Revolution, Thanksgiving has become a patriotic holiday, a time to give thanks for the blessings of liberty as enshrined in the American system of government. Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations end with the date expressed in both the ordinary way and as “year X of the Independence of the United States.”
Nearly four hundred years after the First Thanksgiving, gratitude is still the byword of the day. On the fourth Thursday of November, most Americans, believers and nonbelievers, take seriously the custom of pausing to give thanks. This is the essential meaning of the Thanksgiving holiday. It was also the meaning of the days of thanksgiving marked by the Europeans who preceded the Pilgrims on this continent.
Although we are grateful to the English pilgrims who endured hardships and faced formidable risks to help colonize America, the Thanksgiving decreed by the Spaniard Don Juan de Oñate deserves equal credit and its own place in American history.
—Ann W. Richards, Governor of Texas, 1991
A few weeks before Thanksgiving Day 1991, anyone who happened to be strolling along Court Street in downtown Plymouth would have witnessed a curious sight: a group of unfamiliar men dressed in doublets, wearing odd-shaped metal helmets festooned with feathers, and brandishing swords. What brought a company of sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadores to the heart of this classic New England town, home of the Pilgrim Mothers and Fathers?
All became clear when one of the conquistadores opened his mouth and, in a smooth Texas drawl, started speaking heresy: Plymouth did not deserve to be called the home of the First Thanksgiving, he announced. The true First Thanksgiving in what became the United States of America, he said, took place in San Elizario, Texas, a town twenty miles south of El Paso along the Rio Grande. In April 1598, Spanish settlers and Native Americans broke bread together in a feast that deserves to be acknowledged as America’s First Thanksgiving.
Plymouth’s response? The conquistadores were duly “arrested,” jailed, and charged with “spreading malicious and false rumors and blasphemy.” After a mock trial, they were acquitted on the basis of insufficient evidence and released.
This little drama on the streets of Plymouth was, of course, a show—a good-natured publicity stunt orchestrated by Texan history buffs eager to draw attention to their hometown of San Elizario and the role it played in the early history of the United States. The next year, Plymouth returned the favor, dispatching a contingent of local selectmen dressed as Pilgrims to Texas. They, too, were “arrested,” “tried,” and “convicted,” then pardoned at the base of the gallows.1
This was all good fun—not to mention excellent PR for both towns. As a matter of historical record, however, the Texans had a point. History shows that the Pilgrims weren’t the first Europeans to hold religious services of thanksgiving