It is Thanksgiving week again. As a kid
it was my favorite holiday, edging out (albeit not by much) Halloween and
Christmas. A day when overeating was encouraged appealed to the budding
hedonist in me. Better yet, for years I feasted twice due to competition
between both sets of grandparents: midday with one set and evening at the
other. Eventually my mom had enough of this and called a halt to it; she
thereafter hosted Thanksgiving herself. This had advantages, too, it turned
out. True, my single-day gluttony thereby was reduced to a single table, but all
those marvelous leftovers were right there in our own kitchen. For the next few
days, turkey sandwiches and pecan pie slices were there for the taking. For the
past two decades I have hosted the meal at my table; the attendees vary from a
handful to a crowd depending on the year (and extraneous events such as covid).
I no longer gourmandize with carefree abandon as I did when I was 10, but I
still have some fondness for leftovers.
The mythic association of Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims, by the way, we owe to late Victorian storytellers. There was such an event, but it was neither the first nor foundational. Harvest feasts in the Americas were common among the Spanish and French in the 16th century and later in the English colonies. A Thanksgiving (called by that name) proclaimed in Virginia in 1607 preceded the one in Plymouth colony by 14 years. Thanksgivings were celebrated sporadically in different colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries without any thought of referencing Plymouth. It was first declared a US national holiday by George Washington as a one-off event in 1789. He made no mention whatsoever of the Pilgrim story. The holiday was about the new Constitution: a day for Americans to give thanks for “an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.” Thanksgivings were declared intermittently in subsequent years by presidents and state governors. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln made the holiday permanent. He didn’t mention the Pilgrims either in his proclamation. He instead talked about the things for which to be grateful despite the Civil War. (He also started that weird turkey-pardon tradition.) FDR gave Thanksgiving one final tweak. Lincoln had set the date on the last Thursday of November; Roosevelt changed this to the fourth Thursday (some Novembers, of course, have five) as a Depression-era measure to extend the Christmas shopping season. That is where things remain today.
Few people really concern themselves with origin stories unless trying to make some political point. Most just like the excuse to hang out with family and friends and to pig out. Writes, however, researcher Chloe Nahum-Claudel of the University of Cambridge, “Feasts mobilise people’s values, their morality, and understanding of the world of which they are a part. They have particularly powerful world-making effects because they are both irreducibly concrete – satisfying hunger, exciting pleasures, coordinating the political-economy, and embedding themselves in the organization of time and memory – and expansively meaningful, simultaneously expressing and generating deeply held values.” Maybe so. But I’m pretty much just looking forward to the leftovers.
The mythic association of Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims, by the way, we owe to late Victorian storytellers. There was such an event, but it was neither the first nor foundational. Harvest feasts in the Americas were common among the Spanish and French in the 16th century and later in the English colonies. A Thanksgiving (called by that name) proclaimed in Virginia in 1607 preceded the one in Plymouth colony by 14 years. Thanksgivings were celebrated sporadically in different colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries without any thought of referencing Plymouth. It was first declared a US national holiday by George Washington as a one-off event in 1789. He made no mention whatsoever of the Pilgrim story. The holiday was about the new Constitution: a day for Americans to give thanks for “an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.” Thanksgivings were declared intermittently in subsequent years by presidents and state governors. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln made the holiday permanent. He didn’t mention the Pilgrims either in his proclamation. He instead talked about the things for which to be grateful despite the Civil War. (He also started that weird turkey-pardon tradition.) FDR gave Thanksgiving one final tweak. Lincoln had set the date on the last Thursday of November; Roosevelt changed this to the fourth Thursday (some Novembers, of course, have five) as a Depression-era measure to extend the Christmas shopping season. That is where things remain today.
Few people really concern themselves with origin stories unless trying to make some political point. Most just like the excuse to hang out with family and friends and to pig out. Writes, however, researcher Chloe Nahum-Claudel of the University of Cambridge, “Feasts mobilise people’s values, their morality, and understanding of the world of which they are a part. They have particularly powerful world-making effects because they are both irreducibly concrete – satisfying hunger, exciting pleasures, coordinating the political-economy, and embedding themselves in the organization of time and memory – and expansively meaningful, simultaneously expressing and generating deeply held values.” Maybe so. But I’m pretty much just looking forward to the leftovers.
Jan & Dean - "Let's Turkey
Trot"
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