Hello everybody! Welcome to
this new entry of Montcada in English. Today I’d like to talk about one of my
favorite traditions from the United States: Thanksgiving Day
Thanksgiving Day is a
national holiday celebrated in Canada and the United States as a day of giving
thanks for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year. It is
celebrated on the second Monday of October in Canada and on the fourth Thursday
of November in the United States. Several other places around the world observe
similar celebrations. Thanksgiving has its historical roots in religious and
cultural traditions and has long been celebrated in a secular manner as well.
Prayers of thanks and
special thanksgiving ceremonies are common among almost all religions after
harvests and at other times. The Thanksgiving holiday's history in North
America is rooted in English traditions dating from the Protestant Reformation.
It also has aspects of a harvest festival, even though the harvest in New
England occurs well before the late-November date on which the modern
Thanksgiving holiday is celebrated.
In the English tradition,
days of thanksgiving and special thanksgiving religious services became
important during the English Reformation in the reign of Henry VIII and in
reaction to the large number of religious holidays on the Catholic calendar.
Before 1536 there were 95 Church holidays, plus 52 Sundays, when people were
required to attend church and forego work and sometimes pay for expensive
celebrations. The 1536 reforms reduced the number of Church holidays to 27, but
some Puritans wished to completely eliminate all Church holidays, including
Christmas and Easter. The holidays were to be replaced by specially called Days
of Fasting or Days of Thanksgiving, in response to events that the Puritans
viewed as acts of special providence. Unexpected disasters or threats of
judgement from on high called for Days of Fasting. Special blessings, viewed as
coming from God, called for Days of Thanksgiving. For example, Days of Fasting
were called on account of drought in 1611, floods in 1613, and plagues in 1604 and
1622. Days of Thanksgiving were called following the victory over the Spanish
Armada in 1588 and following the deliverance of Queen Anne in 1705. An unusual
annual Day of Thanksgiving began in 1606 following the failure of the Gunpowder
Plot in 1605 and developed into Guy Fawkes Day.
In the United States, the
modern Thanksgiving holiday tradition is commonly, but not universally, traced
to a sparsely documented 1621 celebration at Plymouth in present-day
Massachusetts. The 1621 Plymouth feast and thanksgiving was prompted by a good
harvest. Pilgrims and Puritans who began emigrating from England in the 1620s
and 1630s carried the tradition of Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving
with them to New England. Several days of Thanksgiving were held in early New
England history that have been identified as the "First
Thanksgiving", including Pilgrim holidays in Plymouth in 1621 and 1623,
and a Puritan holiday in Boston in 1631. According to historian Jeremy Bangs,
director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, the Pilgrims may have been
influenced by watching the annual services of Thanksgiving for the relief of
the siege of Leiden in 1574, while they were staying in Leiden. Now called
Oktober Feesten (which is not the same as the German’s Oktober Fest), Leiden's
autumn thanksgiving celebration in 1617 was the occasion for sectarian
disturbance that appears to have accelerated the pilgrims plans to emigrate to
America. In later years, religious thanksgiving services were declared by civil
leaders such as Governor Bradford, who planned the colony's thanksgiving
celebration and fast in 1623. The practice of holding an annual harvest
festival did not become a regular affair in New England until the late 1660s.
Thanksgiving proclamations
were made mostly by church leaders in New England up until 1682, and then by
both state and church leaders until after the American Revolution. During the
revolutionary period, political influences affected the issuance of
Thanksgiving proclamations. Various proclamations were made by royal governors,
John Hancock, General George Washington, and the Continental Congress, each
giving thanks to God for events favorable to their causes. As President of the
United States, George Washington proclaimed the first nationwide thanksgiving
celebration in America marking November 26, 1789, "as a day of public
thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts
the many and signal favours of Almighty God".
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George Washington
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The first Thanksgiving was
actually celebrated on Feb 21, 1621 when a band of starving pilgrims at
Plymouth Rock were saved at the last minute by the arrival of a ship from
Dublin bearing food from Ireland. The Boston Post, the largest circulation
newspaper in the 1920s and 1930s, discovered the earlier date for the Thanksgiving
ritual. It showed that the traditional date of the autumn of 1621 was actually
incorrect. According to the "Observant Citizen," a columnist for the
Boston Post, the Pilgrims in the winter of their first year were starving and
faced the end of the their project to colonize the new world when “a ship
arrived from overseas bearing the much needed food." Because of anti-Irish
prejudice at the time, the "Observant Citizen" neglected to name it
as an Irish ship, but it was actually The Lyon and “its provenance and that of
the food was Dublin Ireland.” It turns out, from records at the Massachusetts
Historical Society, that the wife of one of the prominent Plymouth Rock
brethren was the daughter of a Dublin merchant and that it was he who chartered
the vessel, loaded it with food and dispatched it to Plymouth. The
"Observant Citizen," whoever he was, never admitted the Irish
connection, even though a number of Irish organizations challenged him on the
issue. Nonetheless, the Massachusetts historical records revealed the tale,
giving the Irish a fair claim to saving Thanksgiving.
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The First Thanksgiving at
Plymouth, oil on canvas by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe (1914)
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In modern times the
President of the United States, in addition to issuing a proclamation, will
"pardon" a turkey, which spares the bird's life and ensures that it
will spend the duration of its life roaming freely on farmland.
The traditional
representation of where the first Thanksgiving was held in the United States
has often been a subject of boosterism and debate, though the debate is often
confused by mixing up the ideas of a Thanksgiving holiday celebration and a
Thanksgiving religious service. According to author James Baker, this debate is
a "tempest in a beanpot" and "marvelous nonsense".
Local boosters in Virginia,
Florida, and Texas promote their own colonists, who (like many people getting
off a boat) gave thanks for setting foot again on dry land.
These claims include an
earlier religious service by Spanish explorers in Texas at San Elizario in
1598, as well as thanksgiving feasts in the Virginia Colony. Robyn Gioia and
Michael Gannon of the University of Florida argue that the earliest
Thanksgiving service in what is now the United States was celebrated by the
Spanish on September 8, 1565, in what is now Saint Augustine, Florida. A day
for Thanksgiving services was codified in the founding charter of Berkeley
Hundred in Charles City County, Virginia in 1619.
According to Baker,
"Historically, none of these had any influence over the evolution of the
modern United States holiday. The American holiday's true origin was the New
England Calvinist Thanksgiving. Never coupled with a Sabbath meeting, the
Puritan observances were special days set aside during the week for
thanksgiving and praise in response to God's providence".
Thanksgiving in the United
States was observed on various dates throughout history. From the time of the
Founding Fathers until the time of Lincoln, the date Thanksgiving was observed
varied from state to state. The final Thursday in November had become the
customary date in most U.S. states by the beginning of the 19th century.
Thanksgiving was first celebrated on the same date by all states in 1863 by a
presidential proclamation of Abraham Lincoln. Influenced by the campaigning of
author Sarah Josepha Hale, who wrote letters to politicians for around 40 years
trying to make it an official holiday, Lincoln proclaimed the date to be the
final Thursday in November in an attempt to foster a sense of American unity
between the Northern and Southern states. Because of the ongoing Civil War and
the Confederate States of America's refusal to recognize Lincoln's authority, a
nationwide Thanksgiving date was not realized until Reconstruction was
completed in the 1870s.
On December 26, 1941,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a joint resolution of Congress changing
the national Thanksgiving Day from the last Thursday in November to the fourth
Thursday. Two years earlier, Roosevelt had used a presidential proclamation to
try to achieve this change, reasoning that earlier celebration of the holiday
would give the country an economic boost.
