Thanksgiving in America 2011

Sarah Josepha Hale, a book editor who authored the nursery rhyme 'Mary Had a Little Lamb,' stumbled across a passage written by an early American colonist describing a great meal after a successful harvest that featured four massive turkeys that they shared with some Native Americans from the Wanpanoag tribe. She was so inspired by the passage that she filled her magazines with traditional holidays recipes for stuffed turkey and pumpkin pie (even though the passage made no mention of the traditional Thanksgiving fare) and wrote editorials about the need to recognize this “Thanksgiving” day. Her writing inspired numerous embellished stories and paintings featuring the “first Thanksgiving meal.” Hale also relentlessly petitioned President Abraham Lincoln to recognize the day with a federal holiday for five years before the Great Emancipator announced the first official Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863 to establish it as an official holiday.

Hale may have indirectly inspired a lot of what we now know as Thanksgiving, but as word spread of her push to make the holiday official and homemakers started whipping up her recipes around the holiday, the story behind it also got a little “whipped up.” Even though Hale was inspired by the colonial passage about the grand meal, she makes no mention of the word “Pilgrim” in her petitions to the President or her magazine features or editorials. According to the book “The Turkey: An American Story,” the only thing that comes close to a “Pilgrim” in her stories is an editorial that uses the phrase “The Pilgrim Fathers” to describe the people who helped organize the meal. Other newspapers and magazines latched on to the phrase and embellished the holiday's history. When it finally crept into school textbooks, the legend was born.

Historians don't know much about the first Thanksgiving feast, if there even was an official one, since there were no other recorded instances of colonists sharing a meal with any Native American tribes after harvests, especially since the two groups shared a long history of violence. In fact, the reason the story spread and became so popular is because a giant influx of British, Irish and European immigrants were moving to America and needed to learn about their new home's “peaceful” heritage. So basically, the story is less about commemorating history and more about good public relations.