Thanksgiving is in Our DNA
The modern American concept of Thanksgiving Day is rooted in the New England colonies but its lineage hails back to festivals and celebrations that crisscrosses nations, cultures, and centuries. Ceremonies celebrating a bountiful harvest with feasting and prayers of thanks to gods and deities can be found among most religions, cultures, and traditions.
Egyptians, Greeks and Romans held bountiful feasts and paid tribute to their gods after harvest season and the ancient Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot certainly qualifies as a thanksgiving celebration. And it goes without saying that American Indian tribes had a strong tradition of celebrating annual harvests before Europeans arrived on the shores of America.
The inspiration for the American holiday of Thanksgiving Day can be traced back to the harvest feast celebrated by the pilgrims of Plymouth Colony and 90 members of the Wampanoag Confederacy after the harvest of 1621. However, it might not have been the first such celebration of thanks documented in the American colonies.
Get American Essays’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In 1565, the Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilé invited the Timucua tribe to a banquet in St. Augustine, Florida, which was held after a mass thanking God for a safe journey and arrival. Fast forward to the Commonwealth of Virginia on December 4, 1619, where British settlers at Berkeley Hundred proclaimed the date as a “a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.
A national day of thanks was established on September 28, 1789, by resolution of the first Federal Congress, which requested that the president of the United States establish a day of thanksgiving. A day of prayer and thanksgiving was proclaimed by George Washington, establishing Thursday, November 26, 1789 as a “Day of Public Thanksgiving”.
An annual celebration of Thanksgiving Day was established by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, when he proclaimed the last Thursday of November as Thanksgiving Day to commemorate the Union Army’s victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy formalized the holiday across America. None of the three presidents mentioned the pilgrims of Plymouth Colony in their respective declarations.
The Plymouth Colony pilgrim’s First Thanksgiving narrative is based on two sources, Bradford and Winslow’s ‘Mourt’s Relation’, 1841, and Bradford’s ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’, 1856. By the mid-19th century the popularity of the Plymouth Colony story was embellished by writers such as Longfellow, and soon captured the imagination of the American public.
Today, the Plymouth Colony pilgrim’s first thanksgiving is merely a decorative motif. Americans gather for a holiday feast, watch football and kickoff their holiday shopping. But celebrating thankfulness is embedded in our DNA and calls to us from prehistoric darkness, universally shared by all peoples, all nations, and all faiths. Thanksgiving is in our DNA. Thanksgiving is perpetual.
American Essays. Published November 24, 2024. ©All Rights Reserved
