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The Daily Signal
Thanksgiving:
A Uniquely American Holiday
Melanie Kirkpatrick
Just about every country has a national day, a holiday when citizens
stop to honor their constitution, celebrate a monarch’s birthday,
recall the day their nation was liberated from colonial rule, or
otherwise pay tribute to their country’s origins. The United States
isn’t unique in celebrating a day of independence.
But Thanksgiving is something else. Only a few countries set aside a
day of national thanksgiving. Most of these holidays trace their
origins back to a time when life beat to the rhythm of the agricultural
cycle.
Koreans celebrate the harvest festival of Chuseok with family
gatherings and visits to their ancestral homes. Similarly, China’s
Mid-Autumn or Moon Festival is a modernized version of long-ago harvest
celebrations. Germany has Erntedankfest, when churches are decorated
with symbols of the harvest.
The first thanksgivings in Canada were religious ceremonies celebrated
by English and French explorers, but the modern Canadian Thanksgiving
Day owes a debt to the American Loyalists who carried the New England
custom with them when they fled to Nova Scotia at the time of the
Revolutionary War.
Brazil’s Thanksgiving Day, which debuted in 1949, was the brainchild of
that country’s ambassador to the United States, who admired the
American holiday. These and other thanksgivings are joyous occasions,
but they say little about what it means to be Korean or Chinese,
German, Canadian, or Brazilian.
In contrast, the American Thanksgiving is far more than an update of an
ancient harvest festival. Thanksgiving has grown up with the country.
It reflects our national identity as a grateful, generous, and
inclusive people.
When a 21st-century American takes his place at the Thanksgiving table
or volunteers at a local food bank, he is part of a continuum that
dates back to 1621, when the Pilgrims and the Indians shared their
famous three-day feast.
As this book has recounted, the most direct influence on the
development of the holiday was the religious days of thanksgiving
marked in all of the American colonies. By the turn of the 18th
century, the after-church Thanksgiving meal had taken on an identity of
its own in New England, and the holiday emerged as a time for
homecomings, feasting, and hospitality, in addition to the religious
aspects.
The Pilgrims weren’t associated with Thanksgiving until the 19th
century, after the establishment of the now mostly forgotten holiday of
Forefathers Day and the emergence of the Pilgrims as icons of liberty
and the forerunners of the Founding Fathers.
The story of how Thanksgiving became a national holiday is itself a
classic American saga of how one enterprising, hardworking individual
with a good idea can have an impact in an open, democratic society.
In this case, a penniless young widow—subject to all the limitations
attached to such a station in life in the early 19th century—rose to
become the editor of the most popular magazine of her era. Sarah
Josepha Hale used her position to generate grassroots support for her
campaign for a national Thanksgiving, and she petitioned the most
powerful men in the land to turn her vision into a reality.
In the political realm, Thanksgiving has sparked debates about core
aspects of American liberty. In 1789, George Washington’s call for a
national Thanksgiving ignited controversy when some members of Congress
believed that the new president was exercising a power that rightly
belonged to the individual states.
Other opponents said the Thanksgiving proposal violated the guarantee
of a separation of church and state found in the First Amendment, which
Congress had just debated.
In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to change the date of
Thanksgiving set off a revolt in statehouses over presidential
authority, with the result that half the country celebrated on one day
and half on another.
We live in a less religious age than did the Pilgrims or Washington or
Hale, but it would be a mistake to claim, as some do, that Thanksgiving
is not a religious holiday. It is that rarest of religious holidays,
one that all religions can, and do, celebrate.
For this, as in so many other things, the nation can thank Washington,
who declared our first Thanksgiving as a nation in a proclamation that
embraced people of all faiths. The Pilgrims came to our shores seeking
religious freedom. On Thanksgiving Day, Americans of all faiths—and of
none—can give thanks that they found it.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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