Thanksgiving at Plymouth: The Christmas Substitute

The celebration of Thanksgiving as a national holiday in late November was not enacted until the 1870s. The official reason was to commemorate the landing at Plymouth of the nation’s Puritan forefathers and foremothers. The holiday’s national designation stemmed from two forces. The first was the unceasing will of author Sarah Josepha Hale who spent 40 years of her adult life campaigning for the declaration of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

The second was the Civil War and its aftermath. Thanksgiving celebrates the American nation and the country’s citizens unity within it and subordination to it. So it is not surprising that Abraham Lincoln issued the first national proclamation for its observance and that his successors, encouraged by Hale, instituted the national date of a Thursday in late November.

Before the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, states held their own observances on a variety of dates under different names. As the location of the Pilgrims’ landing, Massachusetts commemorated the first arrival of the Puritans on the Mayflower at the site of Plymouth rock, which they identified as December 22.

In the town of Plymouth itself, public celebrations began to take place in 1798 and accounts of celebrations over the next 25 years appear in the “Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts,” vol. 17. 

Plymouth’s observances contained three main parts: a religious ceremony which included a procession around the town and a sermon or “oration”; a large dinner followed by the drinking of numerous toasts to leaders past and present; and a festive ball filled with dancing and merriment. This last item is usually accompanied by thanks to the town’s women for organizing such an enjoyable evening.

Toasts feature prominently in the local news reports, which often list them. The dinner of 1798 features 29 separate toasts. Unsurprisingly, later reports reveal worries about public drunkenness.

Plymouth’s annual observance of the “Pilgrim Anniversary” took place just three days before the traditional date of Christmas, December 25. True to their Puritan heritage, most people in Massachusetts during the 18th and early 19th centuries did not celebrate Christmas.

On December 25th, shops were open their normal hours, children attended school, and daily life continued as normal. Merrymakers were often prosecuted for disturbing the peace. Massachusetts continued this treatment of Christmas until well after the Civil War.

Puritans disliked Christmas intensely. It was not a biblically ordained celebration. Nowhere in scripture appears any encouragement for a celebration of Jesus’ birth. When the Reformation took place, many Protestants saw Christmas (and Easter) as part of Catholicism’s “pagan corruption” of Christianity and removed them. American Puritans held to this view long after most other Protestants abandoned it.

Perhaps more importantly, Puritans disapproved of the rowdiness, drunkenness and inappropriate actions that accompanied Christmas celebrations of the time. They believed the celebration of the Savior’s birth, who was God’s Son, should not be a time for encouraging irreligious behavior.

From the 1880s onward, despite changing attitudes in Massachusetts, American Christmas stories and poems decry and ridicule this dour Puritan denial of Christmas and its celebratory joy and festivities.

The stories usually imply and even state outright that the rejection of joyous activity on Christmas day is typical of daily life in New England: no one ever smiles; children are quiet and subdued; there is no pleasure in living; happiness is never expressed.

Such tales overlook the festivities of the Pilgrim festivals just three days before. Celebrating the foundation of America as a nation, these revelries are secular (despite occasional religious overtones). So drunkenness and loud and exciting activities like dancing did not offend religious sensibilities, because they did not take place on a religious holiday.

The people of Plymouth did not shun merriment; they didn’t even shun it in late December. They simply avoided associating it with a day which their puritan heritage linked to “pagan worship.” In many ways, they exemplify what happened in Boston and Massachusetts’ other towns and cities. And, it should be noted, they engaged in the very despised activities that caused their Puritan forefathers to reject Christmas.

Plymouth’s early celebrations of what later became Thanksgiving, then, gave them a day of celebration which they could enjoy at the same time the rest of the country was celebrating Christmas. Their secular observance of the nation’s founding provided a substitute for Christmas religious festivities.

Building a Nation by Giving Thanks

The Thanksgiving holiday is here again. What will we do? We will get together with family and friends and will eat a big meal. And what is the meaning of this activity?  Well, the quick answer is that this is a harvest festival; it celebrates the bountiful crops that have been brought in from the fields during the fall. In other words, we eat to celebrate the harvest that provided the food being eaten.

If this is so, then Thanksgiving is little more than the equivalent of the ancient harvest festivals celebrated three millennia and even longer ago. The ancient Israelites, for example, celebrated a harvest festival called the Feast of Booths that is recorded in the earliest portions of the Bible (Exodus 23).

The parallel with the Feast of Booths suggests that Thanksgiving is not just a harvest festival, but contains multiple layers of meaning. The description in Leviticus 23:42 links the Feast of Booths to the story of the Israelites’ origins, namely, the Exodus from Egypt and their sojourn in the wilderness with God.  It reads: celebrate the feast “so your generations may know that I made the people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.”

A second point appears in the phrase, “that your generations may know.” The scriptural instructions are designed to help the descendants of the Exodus participants remember this founding event. Since dwelling in booths is what the Israelites did when they traveled from Egypt to the land of Israel, the repetition of this action in the Feast causes the celebrants to recall the origins story. It was in these years of wandering with God that the Israelites became God’s chosen people, a nation under God. So the Feast of Booths celebrates not just a harvest but also reminds the celebrants who they are by recalling their beginnings as a group.

This theme of unity was an important feature of the holiday in its early centuries. During the period of the Israelite tribal confederacy (sometimes known as the Judges period), roughly 1200-1000 B.C., the Israelites had no all-Israel government. Each of the tribes had a governing structure, but the only pan-tribal connection lay in the religion. Festival celebrations such as the Feast of Booths bound them together as a people.

Our Thanksgiving holiday functions in the same way.  It is as much a recollection of American origins as it is a harvest festival. Our annually repeated feast recalls their first feast of thanksgiving. By retelling the Pilgrim story and recalling that first feast of thanksgiving at our Thanksgiving time, we remind ourselves of the origins of our nation and our identity as Americans.

Although Thanksgiving did not become a legal American holiday until 1941, from Lincoln’s time onwards US presidents made a proclamation for the celebration of the holiday every year.  In part, this annual attention to Thanksgiving was due to Sara Josepha Hale, who decided in the mid-1800s that Thanksgiving should be a national celebration and not just a local New England feast.  Hale edited the influential women’s magazine Godey’s, a competitor to the Ladies Home Journal, and every year used her position to write editorials, letters, and feature articles encouraging the adoption of Thanksgiving.

Over the decades, increasing numbers of “thanksgivers” joined in the campaign. Originally, Hale’s conception of the holiday united rural and urban America. Cities and their populations were increasing and losing touch with the rural life. Hale’s holiday emphasized plain, wholesome, country food, featuring products native to America: turkey, squash, potatoes, cranberries, and pumpkin. This unsophisticated fare reminded city dwellers of farms and the source of their food, at least once a year.

Following the Civil War, Thanksgiving was celebrated in both North and South and became a healing festival that helped unify the post-war nation. As immigration increased in the 1880s and following, it served as a means of integrating the new-comers into the nation. People whose ancestors may not even have heard of America identified with the pilgrims and made the story of their new nation into their own story. So in the end, a simple harvest festival became a vehicle of national unity.

Note: Thanks to Anne Blue Wills, “Pilgrims and Progress: How Magazines Made Thanksgiving,” Church History (March 2003), pp. 138-158.
November 2016

Thanksgiving at Plymouth: The Christmas Substitute (or, You Can’t Stop a Good Party)

November 11, 2015 

The celebration of Thanksgiving as a national holiday in late November was not enacted until the 1870s. The official reason was to commemorate the landing at Plymouth of the nation’s Puritan forefathers and foremothers. The holiday’s national designation stemmed from two forces. The first was the unceasing will of author Sarah Josepha Hale, who spent 40 years of her adult life campaigning for the declaration of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

The second was the Civil War and its aftermath. Thanksgiving celebrates the American nation and the country’s citizens’ unity within it and subordination to it. So, it is not surprising that Abraham Lincoln issued the first national proclamation for its observance and that his successors, encouraged by Hale, instituted the national date of a Thursday in late November.

Before the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, states held their own observances on a variety of dates under different names. As the location of the Pilgrims’ landing, Massachusetts commemorated the first arrival of the Puritans on the Mayflower at the site of Plymouth Rock, which they identified as Dec. 22.

In the town of Plymouth itself, public celebrations began to take place in 1798, and accounts of celebrations over the next 25 years appear in the Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 17. 

Plymouth’s observances contained three main parts: a religious ceremony that included a procession around the town and a sermon or “oration”; a large dinner followed by the drinking of numerous toasts to leaders past and present; and a festive ball filled with dancing and merriment. This last item is usually accompanied by thanks to the town’s women for organizing such an enjoyable evening.

Toasts feature prominently in the local news reports, which often list them. The dinner of 1798 features 29 separate toasts. Unsurprisingly, later reports reveal worries about public drunkenness.

Plymouth’s annual observance of the “Pilgrim Anniversary” took place just three days before the traditional date of Christmas, Dec. 25. True to their Puritan heritage, most people in Massachusetts during the 18th and early 19th centuries did not celebrate Christmas.

On Dec. 25, shops were open for their normal hours, children attended school, and daily life continued as normal. Merrymakers were often prosecuted for disturbing the peace. Massachusetts continued this treatment of Christmas until well after the Civil War.

Puritans disliked Christmas intensely. It was not a biblically ordained celebration. Nowhere in Scripture appears any encouragement for a celebration of Jesus’ birth. When the Reformation took place, many Protestants saw Christmas (and Easter) as part of Catholicism’s “pagan corruption” of Christianity and removed them. American Puritans held to this view long after most other Protestants abandoned it.

Perhaps more importantly, Puritans disapproved of the rowdiness, drunkenness and inappropriate actions that accompanied Christmas celebrations of the time. They believed the celebration of the Savior’s birth, who was God’s Son, should not be a time for encouraging irreligious behavior.

From the 1880s onward, despite changing attitudes in Massachusetts, American Christmas stories and poems decry and ridicule this dour Puritan denial of Christmas and its celebratory joy and festivities.

The stories usually imply and even state outright that the rejection of joyous activity on Christmas day is typical of daily life in New England: No one ever smiles; children are quiet and subdued; there is no pleasure in living; happiness is never expressed.

Such tales overlook the festivities of the Pilgrim festivals just three days before. Celebrating the foundation of America as a nation, these revelries were secular (despite occasional religious overtones). So drunkenness, and loud and exciting activities like dancing, did not offend religious sensibilities, because they did not take place on a religious holiday.

The people of Plymouth did not shun merriment; they didn’t even shun it in late December. They simply avoided associating it with a day that their Puritan heritage linked to “pagan worship.” In many ways, they exemplify what happened in Boston and other Massachusetts towns and cities. And, it should be noted, they engaged in the much despised activities that caused their Puritan forefathers to reject Christmas.

Plymouth’s early celebrations of what later became Thanksgiving, then, gave them a day of celebration that they could enjoy at the same time the rest of the country was celebrating Christmas. Their secular observance of the nation’s founding provided a substitute for Christmas religious festivities.

Let’s Reschedule Thanksgiving!

With more than five feet of snow in Buffalo, N.Y., and temperatures having fallen into negative territory across most of the northern states, winter has arrived, no matter what date the calendar labels as the season’s official start. Forgotten are August’s grain harvest and September’s apple picking. We are bundled up against the winter wind, shoveling our walks and winterizing our vehicles.

So, why are we only now celebrating Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving is supposed to be a harvest festival. If it commemorates the first harvest of the Pilgrims after they landed in Massachusetts Bay in 1622, then the last Thursday in November is the wrong date. While the exact date of the Pilgrims’ feast is unknown, the two contemporary records of the event make clear it took place in thanks for the harvest gathering just completed.

Since Massachusetts is quite far north in the United States, then the harvest would have been completed by early September. If we include the pumpkin harvest, which ripens latest, the date could have been late September, perhaps the first week of October. None of these possibilities gets close to the start of November, let alone the end.

The real problem with Thanksgiving is that the date was set before our modern, school-based calendar and it really ruins the fall schedule. Coming three months into the four-month fall semester, it places a three-day holiday just one month before an even larger Christmas break. And because it is so long, it prevents a decent fall break halfway through the fall semester, when it would do the students some good.

At the time the date for Thanksgiving was established, school was the last thing on anyone’s mind. There was no national requirement for universal education, even at the primary level. By 1900, only two-thirds of the states required or funded public education. Now that the school calendar shapes the year’s rhythm, we should align Thanksgiving with it.

As a teacher, I find that Thanksgiving prevents a strong push with a solid final unit. If I start before Thanksgiving, then the big break occurs and students forget half of what they learned. If I start afterward, then there is not enough time.

And pity the poor music teachers trying to get the kids ready for the Christmas concerts. Just a week or two from the big event, they disappear from rehearsals for half a week.

And there is no real reason Thanksgiving has to take place in late November. It does not commemorate any specific religious event, like Christmas or Easter. One can “give thanks” anytime. To the extent that one gives thanks for a harvest (the Pilgrims’ or our own), it is appropriate any time from late August to October.

Why is Thanksgiving celebrated when it is? For the early decades of our nation’s history, Thanksgiving was a state celebration, with different states celebrating at different times. In the 1820s, Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of the influential “Godbey’s Lady’s Book,” began an annual campaign to establish a national holiday.

Her promotion gradually gained a following until, in 1863, Abraham Lincoln decreed a national day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November. Lincoln saw this as a way of celebrating the importance of national unity during the Civil War.

Yet, Lincoln established the holiday for only one year. He and his presidential successors inaugurated a tradition of proclaiming the holiday each year afterward. It was not until Congress voted during 1941 to establish a permanent holiday, at the instigation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that we have Thanksgiving as we now celebrate it.

So, the presidential link to Thanksgiving lies in the emphasis on national unity during war. Thanksgiving is important, but their emphasis is not thanksgiving for the harvest, but for the nation and for the sacrifice soldiers were making for it. Again, this is an important reason to be thankful, but not one that requires any specific date.

So, let’s move Thanksgiving to the middle of October. That way, harvest will be over and the crops stored away. It will be late enough to eat pumpkin pie, but not so late that winter will be upon us. The festival will take place in the middle of the fall, so it will fit nicely into the school calendar and provide students with a much needed break, helping them concentrate better the rest of the semester.

Thanksgiving at Plymouth: The Christmas Substitute (or, You Can’t Stop a Good Party)

The celebration of Thanksgiving as a national holiday in late November was not enacted until the 1870s. The official reason was to commemorate the landing at Plymouth of the nation’s Puritan forefathers and foremothers. The holiday’s national designation stemmed from two forces. The first was the unceasing will of author Sarah Josepha Hale, who spent 40 years of her adult life campaigning for the declaration of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

The second was the Civil War and its aftermath. Thanksgiving celebrates the American nation and the country’s citizens’ unity within it and subordination to it. So, it is not surprising that Abraham Lincoln issued the first national proclamation for its observance and that his successors, encouraged by Hale, instituted the national date of a Thursday in late November.

Before Thanksgiving was established as a national holiday, states held their own observances on a variety of dates under different names. As the location of the Pilgrims’ landing, Massachusetts commemorated the first arrival of the Puritans on the Mayflower at the site of Plymouth Rock, which they identified as Dec. 22.

In the town of Plymouth itself, public celebrations began to take place in 1798, and accounts of celebrations over the next 25 years appear in the Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 17. 

Plymouth’s observances contained three main parts: a religious ceremony that included a procession around the town and a sermon or “oration”; a large dinner followed by the drinking of numerous toasts to leaders past and present; and a festive ball filled with dancing and merriment. This last item is usually accompanied by thanks to the town’s women for organizing such an enjoyable evening.

Toasts feature prominently in the local news reports, which often list them. The 1798 dinner features 29 separate toasts. Unsurprisingly, later reports reveal worries about public drunkenness.

Plymouth’s annual observance of the “Pilgrim Anniversary” took place just three days before the traditional date of Christmas, Dec. 25. True to their Puritan heritage, most people in Massachusetts during the 18th and early 19th centuries did not celebrate Christmas.

On Dec. 25, shops were open their normal hours, children attended school and daily life continued as normal. Merrymakers often were prosecuted for disturbing the peace. Massachusetts continued this treatment of Christmas until well after the Civil War.

Puritans disliked Christmas intensely. It was not a biblically ordained celebration. Nowhere in scripture appears any encouragement for a celebration of Jesus’ birth. When the Reformation took place, many Protestants saw Christmas (and Easter) as part of Catholicism’s “pagan corruption” of Christianity and removed them. American Puritans held to this view long after most other Protestants abandoned it.

Perhaps more importantly, Puritans disapproved of the rowdiness, drunkenness and inappropriate actions that accompanied Christmas celebrations of the time. They believed the celebration of the Savior’s birth, who was God’s Son, should not be a time for encouraging irreligious behavior.

From the 1880s onward, despite changing attitudes in Massachusetts, American Christmas stories and poems decry and ridicule this dour Puritan denial of Christmas and its celebratory joy and festivities.

The stories usually imply and even state outright that the rejection of joyous activity on Christmas day is typical of daily life in New England: no one ever smiles; children are quiet and subdued; there is no pleasure in living; happiness is never expressed.

Such tales overlook the festivities of the Pilgrim festivals just three days before. Celebrating the foundation of America as a nation, these revelries are secular (despite occasional religious overtones). So drunkenness, and loud and exciting activities like dancing, do not offend religious sensibilities, because they do not take place on a religious holiday.

The people of Plymouth do not shun merriment; they don’t even shun it in late December. They simply avoid associating it with a day which their puritan heritage links to “pagan worship.” In many ways, they exemplify what is happening in Boston and other Massachusetts towns and cities. And, it should be noted, they engaged in the much despised activities that caused their Puritan forefathers to reject Christmas.

Plymouth’s early celebrations of what later became Thanksgiving, then, gave them a day of celebration that they could enjoy at the same time the rest of the country was celebrating Christmas. Their secular observance of the nation’s founding provided a substitute for Christmas religious festivities.