History of Thanksgiving

The popular myth about Thanksgiving gives an impression as if the major hardships of the residents of Plymouth Colony consisted of having no television to watch or to have to go to church on Thursday for Thanksgiving, which is hardly true. First of all, it will be surprising to note that the participants of the 1621 feast would hardly have considered their celebration as Thanksgiving and was very different from the modern-day celebration. It was a one-time event and it was not continued year after year, annually or otherwise. There were no commemorative events held based on that feast.

To the settlers of Plymouth, Thanksgiving was held throughout the year and was not fixed to a particular day or event. It was a strictly religious observation involving fasts and prayer. While the feast of 1621 was a secular celebration, their Thanksgivings were held for myriad of reasons and certainly excluded any outsiders or worldly diversions. In fact, Thanksgiving traditions of today have fairly modern origin and were observed since the 19th century. It was in first part of the 20th century that it was directly associated with the Pilgrims. Thanksgiving today, is based on the New England puritan Thanksgiving or religious Thanksgiving, traditional harvest celebrations of England and New England and perhaps ideas like commemorating pilgrims in the ship named Mayflower that landed at Plymouth.

In Plymouth Colony, the first ever Thanksgiving that was documented was celebrated in late July of 1623. In 1621, it was more of a harvest festival, which was celebrated after a much-needed rain that revived the crop of corn and other fruits. Massasoit, the chief of the Native Indians or Wampanoags, and his family were invited for the celebration, perhaps as a political maneuver, to participate in the feast, who brought all his extended family that constituted ninety guests and stayed for three days. Some of the other popular myths are about dress and furniture of pilgrims. Pilgrims did not wear only black and white or had buckles on their hats, garments, and shoes. Buckles cane in fashion in later 17th century and black and white were reserved mainly for Sundays and formal occasions. The popular colors among women were red, earthy green, brown, blue, violet and gray and men wore white, beige, black, earthy green and brown.

Pilgrims only had chests and boxes on Mayflower and built their furniture after settling in Plymouth. It is also a myth that the original Thanksgiving feast took place on the fourth Thursday of November. It was actually held sometime between September 21 and November 11 and was three days long. The event was to be based on English harvest festival that was traditionally celebrated around 29th September and Governor William Bradford had declared it originally as a day of thanksgiving, fasting and prayer, shared by all the colonists and neighboring Indians, to ask God's favor to overcome draught.

During the prayers, the rain came and the event was spontaneously changed into a thanksgiving event and since then it became a custom to celebrate thanksgiving annually after the harvest in New England. The Continental Congress suggested observance of National Thanksgiving Day during the American Revolution and in 1817; the state of New York State adopted it as an annual custom. Gradually, other states joined the observance of Thanksgiving Day. Abraham Lincoln appointed the last Thursday in November as the Thanksgiving Day, perhaps to commemorate the anchoring of the Mayflower at Cape Cod on November 21, 1621. President Franklin D. Roosevelt specifically mentioned that the date for Thanksgiving was set to the fourth Thursday of November in 1939.