Thanksgiving (United States)

Based on Wikipedia: Thanksgiving (United States)

The Feast That Almost Wasn't

Here's something that might surprise you: the famous "first Thanksgiving" of 1621 was completely forgotten for over two hundred years. The celebration we know today—with its turkey, football, and family gatherings—wasn't born from that harvest feast in Plymouth at all. It was essentially invented in the 1800s by a magazine editor from New Hampshire who had never even been to Plymouth Rock.

But let's start at the beginning. Or rather, let's start with what the beginning actually was, which isn't what most Americans learned in elementary school.

Before the Pilgrims: A Continent Already Giving Thanks

Days of thanksgiving—moments set aside to express gratitude to the divine—are ancient. They predate not just America but the very concept of nation-states. Every human culture, it seems, has felt the need to pause and acknowledge that survival is not guaranteed, that harvests can fail, that we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control.

The first recorded "Thanksgiving" in North America didn't happen in Massachusetts. It happened in 1578, in what is now Nunavut, the vast Arctic territory of northern Canada. Sir Martin Frobisher and his crew, having survived the brutal passage across the North Atlantic, held a ceremony of thanks for their safe arrival. No turkey. No pumpkin pie. Just grateful sailors on frozen ground.

The Spanish beat the Pilgrims by more than half a century. In 1565, when the city of St. Augustine, Florida was founded, the settlers reportedly shared a thanksgiving meal with the local Timucua people. That was fifty-six years before the Pilgrims ever set foot on Plymouth Rock.

Virginia has its own claim. In 1619, thirty-eight English settlers landed at Berkeley Hundred, along the James River. Their charter from the London Company explicitly required them to observe the anniversary of their arrival "yearly and perpetually" as "a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God." Today, Berkeley Plantation—the ancestral home of the Harrison family, which produced two American presidents—still commemorates this event annually.

So why don't we celebrate Thanksgiving in September, honoring the Spanish in Florida? Or in December, honoring the Virginians?

The answer has everything to do with who tells the story, and when.

What Actually Happened in Plymouth

The Plymouth colonists—we call them Pilgrims now, though they didn't use that term themselves—arrived in late 1620 at one of the worst possible times. Winter was coming. They had no established shelter, limited food, and no knowledge of the land they'd claimed.

The land they settled wasn't empty wilderness. It had been home to the Patuxet people, who had been devastated by an epidemic—likely brought by earlier European contact—that swept through between 1614 and 1620. The Pilgrims built their colony on the bones of a destroyed civilization.

That first winter was catastrophic. Half the colonists died.

Then came Squanto.

His full name was Tisquantum, and his story is one of the most remarkable in American history. He was the last surviving member of the Patuxet. Years earlier, he had been kidnapped by English traders and sold into slavery in Spain. He escaped, made his way to England, learned English, and eventually returned to his homeland—only to find that his entire people had been wiped out during his absence. The Pilgrims were living where his village had stood.

Rather than seek revenge, Squanto became an interpreter and guide for the colonists. He taught them how to catch eels and grow corn. Without him, Plymouth Colony would almost certainly have failed.

Squanto wasn't acting alone. He arrived at the request of Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoag confederation. Massasoit had his own strategic reasons for helping the English. His people had also been weakened by the same epidemic that destroyed the Patuxet, and they faced a serious threat from the Narragansett, a rival group that had largely escaped the disease. Massasoit calculated that an alliance with the well-armed English—who had brought women and children, indicating they weren't there to wage war—could help balance the power.

It was a pragmatic bargain, not a fairy tale of friendship. Both sides were using each other to survive.

The Feast Itself: Not What You Pictured

In the autumn of 1621, after bringing in a successful harvest, the Plymouth colonists held a three-day celebration. The exact date is unknown, but historians believe it was likely around late September or early October—possibly near Michaelmas, the traditional English harvest festival on September 29th.

Here's what we know for certain: the colonists did not call it Thanksgiving. They didn't even think of it as a religious observance. It was a harvest celebration, a secular party to mark the end of a successful growing season.

And the famous image of Pilgrims and Native Americans sitting down together as invited guests? That's not quite right either.

According to accounts passed down by Wampanoag descendants, the feast was originally planned for the Pilgrims alone. Part of the celebration involved the colonists demonstrating their firearms—essentially showing off their weapons. Massasoit and about ninety Wampanoag warriors, hearing the gunfire and bound by their mutual protection agreement, arrived fully armed, assuming their allies were under attack.

Finding instead a party, they were welcomed to join. The Wampanoag contributed deer and other foods. The celebration continued for three days.

As for what they ate: forget the Butterball turkey and the canned cranberry sauce. There were no potatoes—the potato is native to South America and hadn't entered the global food system yet. There were no pies, because the colonists had no butter, no wheat flour, and no sugar.

They did eat fowl, which may have included wild turkey but also included ducks and geese. They ate fish, eels, and shellfish. They ate nasaump, a Wampanoag dish of boiled cornmeal mixed with vegetables and meat that the Pilgrims had adopted. They ate venison from the deer the Wampanoag had killed.

The meal was cooked primarily by four women: Eleanor Billington, Elizabeth Hopkins, Mary Brewster, and Susanna White. These were the only adult Pilgrim women who had survived the first winter. Four women fed over 140 people for three days.

The Two-Hundred-Year Gap

Here's where the story takes an unexpected turn. After that 1621 feast, the event was essentially forgotten.

William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth, wrote about it in his book "Of Plymouth Plantation." Edward Winslow described it in a publication called "Mourt's Relation." But Bradford's book wasn't published until the 1850s. Mourt's Relation existed but was rarely read in full—other publications would summarize it without including the harvest feast. By the 1700s, the original booklet seemed to be lost. A copy was rediscovered in Philadelphia in 1820 and fully reprinted in 1841.

In that 1841 reprinting, an editor named Alexander Young added a footnote. He described the 1621 feast as the "first Thanksgiving."

This was the first time anyone had made that connection. Young wasn't reporting history; he was creating it. He called the event the "first Thanksgiving" because it reminded him of the Thanksgiving traditions he knew from his own time—traditions that had developed completely independently over the previous two centuries.

How Thanksgiving Actually Became Thanksgiving

The holiday we celebrate today grew out of a different tradition entirely: the harvest thanksgivings of Calvinist New England.

Throughout the 1600s and 1700s, various New England communities developed their own annual thanksgiving observances. These were religious occasions, marked by church services, large family meals, and various entertainments ranging from games to formal dances. They typically fell somewhere between early November and mid-December.

For many New Englanders, especially those from Calvinist backgrounds who rejected the celebration of Christmas as too "popish," these thanksgivings served a similar social function. Families gathered. Special foods were prepared. It was a holiday without being too obviously a holiday.

These traditions gradually spread as New Englanders moved westward and southward across the growing nation. But they remained regional. The South had its own customs. So did the Mid-Atlantic states.

Enter Sarah Josepha Hale.

The Woman Who Created Thanksgiving

Sarah Josepha Hale was born in New Hampshire in 1788, steeped in the traditions of New England Thanksgiving from childhood. She became the editor of Godey's Lady's Book, which was the most widely read magazine in America before the Civil War. Think of it as the combination of Vogue, Good Housekeeping, and The Atlantic for its era.

Hale had a vision. She saw America fracturing—North against South, urban against rural, immigrant against native-born. She believed a shared national holiday could help unite the country. And she thought Thanksgiving, with its emphasis on home, family, and gratitude, was the perfect candidate.

For decades, every November, Hale devoted her magazine column to Thanksgiving. She didn't just advocate for the holiday; she essentially designed it. She promoted specific foods—turkey, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes. She championed specific decorations. She defined the role of women in organizing and hosting the celebration.

Her vision was explicitly about creating a "standardized American." The stories in Godey's depicted Black servants, Roman Catholics, and Southerners all celebrating Thanksgiving—and in Hale's view, becoming more truly American by doing so. For Hale, being American meant becoming more like White Protestant Northerners. It was assimilationist propaganda dressed up as holiday recipes.

Hale also wrote directly to multiple presidents, urging them to proclaim a national day of thanksgiving. Most ignored her or declined.

Then came Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln's Proclamation

In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, with the nation literally tearing itself apart, Lincoln issued a proclamation establishing an annual national day of thanksgiving. It was to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November.

This was not about honoring the Pilgrims. Lincoln made no mention of Plymouth. He spoke instead of gratitude for Union military victories, for the productivity of American farms and factories, and for the general blessings of providence during a time of national crisis.

Hale had finally won her campaign. Thanksgiving was now a national holiday.

But when did the Pilgrims enter the picture?

Inventing a Shared Past

The late 1800s and early 1900s were a time of massive immigration to the United States. Millions arrived from Southern and Eastern Europe—Italians, Poles, Russians, Jews, Greeks. The established population, largely Protestant and Northern European, grew anxious.

One response was restrictive immigration laws. Another was a push to "Americanize" the newcomers—to teach them to speak English, adopt American customs, and identify with American history.

But what was American history? The country was less than 150 years old. It had no ancient myths, no thousand-year dynasties, no deep cultural traditions that every citizen shared.

So educators created them.

Public schools developed a calendar of civic holidays, each with its own classroom activities, songs, and pageants. Washington's Birthday. Memorial Day. Flag Day. And Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving was particularly useful for this project. It was non-denominational, so it didn't favor any particular Christian church. It had harvest themes that felt universal. And best of all, it could be illustrated with a simple, powerful image: English colonists and Native Americans sitting down to eat together in peace.

For immigrant children—kids who had left far-off lands, struggled under harsh conditions, and were trying to find their place in a new country—the Pilgrim story resonated. These were people just like their own parents, crossing an ocean, facing the unknown, ultimately being welcomed to America's bounty.

The fact that the 1621 feast had nothing to do with the origin of the national holiday, and that the relationship between colonists and Native Americans would soon turn genocidal, was quietly set aside.

School pageants reenacting an imagined "First Thanksgiving" became common. Children dressed as Pilgrims in black hats and buckled shoes (the Pilgrims didn't actually dress like that). Children dressed as "Indians" in feathered headdresses (the Wampanoag didn't actually wear those). The mythology was complete.

The Turkey and the Football

How did turkey become the defining food of Thanksgiving?

Wild turkeys were certainly eaten at the 1621 feast—or at least, they might have been. The colonists wrote about having "great store of wild turkeys" without specifying that turkey was the main course. But as Thanksgiving evolved in the 1800s, turkey emerged as the bird of choice.

Part of the reason was practical. Turkeys are large—large enough to feed an extended family gathering. They're also indigenous to North America, which gave them a patriotic sheen. And raising turkeys didn't require the year-round investment that other livestock demanded; you could fatten them up specifically for the holiday.

Sarah Josepha Hale championed turkey in her magazine, and turkey it was.

As for football: the first college football game on Thanksgiving was played in 1876, between Yale and Princeton. The tradition took hold quickly. By the 1890s, Thanksgiving football games were a major cultural event, particularly among the upper classes in the Northeast. The first NFL Thanksgiving game was played in 1920.

Today, millions of Americans watch football on Thanksgiving afternoon, often while recovering from overeating. The sport has become as much a part of the holiday as the meal itself.

Black Friday and the Shopping Season

Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the American holiday shopping season. The day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, is often considered the busiest retail shopping day of the year.

The name "Black Friday" has murky origins. One popular explanation is that it refers to the day when retailers' annual ledgers shift from red (losses) to black (profits). Another traces it to 1950s Philadelphia, where police used the term to describe the chaotic crowds of shoppers and tourists flooding the city before the annual Army-Navy football game on Saturday.

Whatever its origins, Black Friday has become its own cultural phenomenon, complete with doorbusters, pre-dawn store openings, and occasional stampedes. In recent years, Cyber Monday—the online shopping equivalent, held on the Monday after Thanksgiving—has grown equally significant.

This commercial aspect of Thanksgiving has always coexisted somewhat uncomfortably with the holiday's stated purpose of gratitude. We give thanks on Thursday, then trample each other for discounted televisions on Friday.

The Date Controversy

For most of its history as a national holiday, Thanksgiving fell on the last Thursday of November. Then came 1939.

That year, the last Thursday of November fell on November 30th—leaving only twenty-four shopping days before Christmas. Retailers, worried about their bottom line, lobbied President Franklin Roosevelt to move the holiday earlier.

Roosevelt complied, proclaiming Thanksgiving a week earlier, on November 23rd. The backlash was immediate and fierce.

Critics called it "Franksgiving." Twenty-three states refused to recognize the new date and celebrated on the original last Thursday. Football schedules were thrown into chaos. Families found themselves split, with some members celebrating on different weeks.

The confusion lasted two years. Finally, in 1941, Congress passed a law establishing Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday of November—not necessarily the last. This meant Thanksgiving could fall as early as November 22nd or as late as November 28th, depending on how the calendar fell.

The compromise held. It still holds today.

The Native American Perspective

For many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday at best and a day of mourning at worst.

The mythology of peaceful coexistence between Pilgrims and Indians obscures what came after. Within a generation of that 1621 feast, the relationship between English colonists and the Wampanoag had deteriorated into open war. King Philip's War, fought from 1675 to 1678, was one of the bloodiest conflicts in American history relative to population. Massasoit's son, Metacom—whom the English called King Philip—led a desperate resistance against colonial expansion.

The Wampanoag lost. Metacom was killed, beheaded, and quartered. His head was displayed on a spike in Plymouth for twenty years. Survivors were sold into slavery in the Caribbean.

This is not the story told in elementary school pageants.

Since 1970, many Native Americans have observed a National Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, gathering at Plymouth to remember the genocide that followed the so-called first Thanksgiving. They don't ask others to stop celebrating; they simply insist on telling the full story.

What Thanksgiving Means Now

Thanksgiving has become something both more and less than its mythology.

Less, because the historical claims don't hold up. The Pilgrims didn't invent the holiday. They weren't even called Pilgrims at the time. The feast they shared with the Wampanoag had nothing to do with the national tradition that developed centuries later. The mythology was largely created to assimilate immigrants and foster national identity.

But more, too, because holidays are what we make of them. Thanksgiving has become genuinely meaningful for millions of people—a time to gather with family, to prepare and share a meal, to pause in the middle of a busy year and acknowledge gratitude.

The foods have evolved. Alongside turkey and mashed potatoes, Americans now serve macaroni and cheese (a Southern tradition), wild rice stuffing (from the Great Lakes region), pecan pie, tamales, collard greens, and whatever other dishes reflect their family's heritage. The holiday has become a canvas for culinary diversity.

Charitable organizations serve Thanksgiving dinners to the homeless and hungry, making tangible the holiday's stated values. Religious services offer formal moments of thanks. Parades fill city streets. And yes, football dominates the television.

The fourth Thursday of November has become, for better and worse, one of the most distinctly American days on the calendar. Not because of what happened in 1621, but because of what we've chosen to do with it since.

Like most things worth celebrating, the truth is messier than the myth. The question isn't whether the Pilgrims really invited the Wampanoag to dinner. The question is what we do with the day now—and whether we're honest about where it came from.