Thanksgiving: The Real Feast

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We've all heard the story of the pilgrims and the Indians getting together all friendly-like to celebrate the good harvest. Truth be told, the party didn't go down quite like the children's story says. The tradition now known as Thanksgiving went through some stuff to become a national holiday. And although there are many versions of the story, one in particular says that the First Thanksgiving was a bit more hostile than storybooks let on. The pilgrims were indeed holding a feast to celebrate the year's harvest and good health, but they also wanted to show their strength to the Natives in the area. Several men went out bearing arms and fired. The Natives saw this as a threat, and sent ninety men stomping on the pilgrims party. They did their part to contribute, bringing anywhere from five to nine deer to add to the meal. The games and gluttony went on with a cold air, and was named the First Thanksgiving. Other versions as to what really happened include the well-known storybook happy ending, a villainous, plotting Squanto, and a variety of tales blending together into more variations of the storybook.
Thanksgiving as we know it, the big jumble of cooked turkey, people, and parades, was not legally a holiday until 1863, when a woman named Sarah J. Hale finally won her battle. After her husband died, Hale was left to care for five children, writing poems, teaching, and running her hat shop. Thanks to a book of poems including "Mary had a Little Lamb", Hale became the first female editor for a paper in the U.S. She spent much of her time writing letters to ministers, every U.S. president, governors and editors with one request: that the last Thursday of November be set aside to "offer God our tribute of joy and gratitude for the blessings of the year," according to almanac. During the Civil War, while the U.S. was ragged and torn, people started paying attention to Hale and her ideas. She wrote to Abe Lincoln, pleading for Thanksgiving to become a legal national holiday. Hale's idea intrigued President Lincoln, who on October 3, 1863, declared Thanksgiving to be a holiday held on the last Thursday of November. Store owners in 1939 weren't a huge fan of the timing of Thanksgiving. They pressed President Franklin D. Roosevelt to have the festival moved to the third Thursday of November, as to add more shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Roosevelt did, yet many citizens continued to celebrate on the last Thursday. Franklin, in 1941, decided to move the festivities to the fourth Thursday of November, as is celebrated today.













--K.K.

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