What makes Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving?

We all probably have the same idea about what our Thanksgivings each year looks like: family, turkey, and being thankful for all that we have. We were taught that Thanksgiving came from a feast with the pilgrims and the Indians in the northeast. The idea of a national holiday dedicating to giving thanks evolved with the help of marketing in the 20th century and the amount of work it took to create Thanksgiving. These things are what created the traditional Thanksgiving we have today.

The Thanksgiving story was one like no other. One, because it is inaccurate in a way, textbooks and media give out interpretations of history which ended up changing it. Two, it took years through governmental action to make this day a national holiday. While reading the article Everything You Learned About Thanksgiving is Wrong by Maya Salem I learned that maybe we did see the wrong side of thanksgiving or as Americans we fully do not understand all that went into the day. The Mayflower did bring pilgrims to Plymouth and colonized it in 1620. In 1621 they celebrated a great harvest season, they did this by hosting a get together for 3 days and there were members of the local Wampanoag tribe at this celebrations. This is where our most popular origin of Thanksgiving comes from. But there are other beliefs on what started the holiday, Plymouth 400 is a non-profit that thinks thanksgiving became in 1614- Squanto and his people were stolen taken and sold as slaves in Europe. I had never known that there could be so many different sparks to start a phenomenon like this.

I then began to learn about the legal side in which the government took on a battle to create a new national holiday. I gathered my new knowledge of information from ms. Salem's article stated above and History.coms article: Abraham Lincoln and the “mother of Thanksgiving”.  Sara Josepha Hale firmly believed in thanksgiving and did a lot of work to achieve it. Hale wrote about her celebrations on Thanksgiving in her one of her novels. She attempted to get the government to save the last Thursday in November for a national day of thanks. She thought that in the post-war era it would relieve some tension between the union and the south. In 1830 there was an event named Thanksgiving, a version I guess of what the real thanksgiving would become. As word and idea spread by 1850, at least 30 states and territories, celebrated the holiday. Lincoln made the holiday official in 1863 to thank the union for the war victories in Mississippi and Pennsylvania. Going back in history they found that the original continental congress had created many days of thanks to honor the U.S military. George Washington also in his time created a day to celebrate the end of the revolution and the ratification of the new constitution. There was some postponement on the holiday because it mixed church and state. Finally, it resulted in Lincoln making Thanksgiving a national holiday on the last Thursday of November. There was once in FDR’s term that he wanted to change it and did but ended up changing it back in 1941  and it was passed in Congress.

People often wonder how the food we associate with Thanksgiving came to be. There are obviously the classics but also heritage was mixed in based on the history of the family. I learned this from the Smithisonian.com article. Everyone loved that it was centered around “family, food, and survival” Marketers and American society changed the tradition of Thanksgiving by the food. Families had a variety of meat to choose from for their Thanksgiving feast turkey was just an option in the 1920s. Then turkey became heavily advertised and the utensils to use and handle the turkey. And the importance of turkey came from this marketing explosion. In the 1900s: 88% of U.S families had turkeys on Thanksgiving and 20% of the turkey consumed in a year is consumed on Thanksgiving An ad came out with whole cranberries with turkey in the 30s. And that was the thing to do until ocean spray came out with a jelly cranberry sauce which immediately gave an addition to the thanksgiving feast. Then there is the pumpkin pie and honestly, I hate pumpkin pie. It came from companies (Libby, Borden and Smiths) fighting to make this fall ingredient on to american families’ tables. This competition still exists today. The table is filled with iconic dishes and ones that hit close to home for each person. Making thanksgiving so special.

1950s Turkey ad

NYT's: Everything you learned about Thanksgiving is wrong
History.com: Abraham Lincoln and the "Mother of Thanksgiving"
Smithsonian: the invisible way that marketers set the menu for your Thanksgiving feast