Thanksgiving Origins
It’s that time of year again when families are together! Sometimes the reunions aren’t the greatest and you just sit tight and bare through it. For others, it’s a time much anticipated. Whatever the personal feelings are, you still give thanks and overeat.
Prayers of thanks and special thanksgiving are common among all religions after harvests or other times people felt the need to give ...well, thanks. In the English tradition, these became very important during the the English Reformation.
For those of you that don’t know what the English Reformation is, it’s the term for the period Christians and other religions were fighting to worship freely.
Most people of the 1500s felt that religious events and holiday’s had become too commercialized, not to mention, way too many. Before 1536 there were 95 Church holidays on top of 52 Sundays where people were required to attend, and sometimes pay for expensive celebrations. In 1536, they finally reduced it from 95 to 27 holidays. However, some Puritans (the radical reformers of the time) wanted to eliminate all church holiday’s including Christmas and Easter. Instead, they wanted something called Days of Fasting or Days of Thanksgiving. These would be celebrated in response to good or bad events.
So, for example, let’s say if England had a super good harvest, they would celebrate a Day of Thanksgiving. Or maybe a town was struck with a sickness, they would want a Day of Fasting. Keep in mind, most people from this time believed every small thing, whether good or bad, happened for a reason. These holiday’s played right into their beliefs. But being controlled by government and/or prominent religious figures made even the most peaceful person angry. I’m sure dumping all these holiday’s sounded good.
Our modern American Thanksgiving is traced to a Day of Thanksgiving celebrated by the settlement of Plymouth also known as the First Thanksgiving. Remember, Pilgrims and Puritans came mostly from England thus bringing these holiday beliefs with them. Sadly, this event is poorly documented but one thing we can be sure of, many Indians came down to Plymouth and partied for 3 days.
A day of Thanksgiving was randomly announced by church leaders in New England up until 1682, then both church and state leaders did so until after the American Revolution. During the revolutionary time, political influences effected these Thanksgiving Proclamations. Often people of importance (John Hancock, George Washington, ect.) would set a day of Thanksgiving when something happened in their favor.
As president of the United States, George Washington officially set Thanksgiving as a national holiday on November 26, 1789, “as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God”.
And our nation has been celebrating this holiday every year since. So eat lots of turkey, smile with your friends & family, and party Plymouth style!
Bree Danielle
November 2013
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We moved from the city to the country in 2005. Since then, we have been building structures, raising livestock and growing some of our own foods. We are crazy about family, nutrition and want the best for our growing family.
