Thanksgiving Themes

Warning: this post has little to do with teaching Humanities. At best, it may have some relevance to Colonial North America and the phenomenon of nativism.


As we head into the holiday season, I am aware of the divide between my own experience and The Ideal Holiday which I see celebrated in commercial culture and public spaces. The disparity can leave me a bit unnerved.

Fortunately, there is NPR! While chopping away on Thursday morning, there was lots of great programming about Thanksgiving history on KUOW94.9, which I am going to summarize for you in lieu of presenting any original ideas.

What struck me in the themes of this programming is that Thanksgiving has always been an artificial celebration. It is true that the original settlers may have shared meals with indigenous people and may even have offered feasts of Thanksgiving. However, as good Puritans, the pilgrims would have been as likely to fast as to feast and might well have found the idea of a Thanksgiving "feast" a bit presumptuous.

In fact, the Thanksgiving holiday was an observance tirelessly promoted by a New England woman named Sarah Josepha Hale, who expressly intended it to be a didactic holiday promoting the virtues of an idealized New England life. To her, it was an important feature that the holiday would involve a return to the countryside and to a traditional domestic sphere where women had influence. (Hale opposed women's suffrage, though she was interested in expanding women's access to education and influence.) Hale pitched the idea of a national day of Thanksgiving to five successive presidents until she finally won the attention of Abraham Lincoln, who declared Thanksgiving a national holiday right in the middle of the Civil War--at a time when the nation was literally tearing itself apart. So Thanksgiving was created to simulate a sense of national harmony and unity which did not exist. This makes me feel so much better.

While my holidays may never resemble the Currier and Ives model, I am relieved to know that the Currier and Ives model was an idealized mock-up from the very start.