Ideas to Improve Your Holiday Celebration
Recently, as I listened to to the first verse of the 1993 Loudon Wainwright III song, "Suddenly It's Christmas," these lyrics sounded a cautionary note:
Suddenly it's Christmas
Right after Hallowe'en.
Forget about Thanksgiving;
It's just a buffet in between.
And then I started to think seriously about the upcoming holiday and wondered what could be done to make Thanksgiving more than "just a buffet." These days how did the "giving" of "thanks" come to be secondary to the size of the stuffed turkey, the number of pumpkin pies on the dessert table and the outcome of an NFL football game? More importantly, what changes might we plan ahead to make for a happier, healthier holiday outcome this November?
In this series, Put the "Thanks" Back into Thanksgiving, we will look for ways to instill more gratitude into your holiday ritual, and we will also share tips to make the celebration healthier at the same time. Before we get to those specifics, though, let's begin with a trip back through time to Plymouth Colony in 1621 to set the correct perspective.
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>>> How did it all begin? <<<
Historically the states of Maine, Virginia, Texas and Florida have each staked out a claim to originating the very first Thanksgiving celebration in America. While there is no doubt that English colonists and Spanish explorers did celebrate religious services of thanksgiving in North America years before the good ship Mayflower arrived, those were isolated celebrations and consequently were forgotten long before any formal establishment of the American holiday. Most people today agree with James W. Baker, who states in his book, Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday, that the now-famous three-day event in Plymouth Colony in the fall of 1621 was "the historical birth of the American Thanksgiving holiday."
Almost 400 years ago Edward Winslow wrote the following words about that very first Thanksgiving:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together. And…by the goodness of God we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty. – Edward Winslow, 1621
The holiday changed, though, as our dogmatic Puritan and Pilgrim ancestors of the 17th century evolved into the 18th century’s more cosmopolitan Yankees. By the end of the 1700s much of the emotional significance for the New England family had come to center more so around a dinner table, which had largely replaced the civil and religious importance of Thanksgiving. Since then, carried by the popular press and Yankee settlers migrating westward, east coast Thanksgiving holiday traditions spread outward to the rest of the nation. In 1777 the Continental Congress proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving, and the early Presidents Washington, Adams and Monroe each continued the practice. As early as 1815, though, celebration of the holiday had fallen out of favor at the federal level and was limited to individual state observances. By the 1850s almost every state and territory celebrated Thanksgiving according to their local legislation and various customs.
In 1827 Sarah Josepha Hale, the influential editor of a popular women’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, began a campaign to reinstate the holiday as a national observance after the model of the first Presidents. She publicly petitioned several Presidents to make it an annual event, and her efforts finally succeeded in 1863, when she was able to convince President Abraham Lincoln that a national Thanksgiving observation might help to unite the recently war-torn country. As a point of interest the President actually declared two national Thanksgivings that year, one for August 6 in celebration of the victory at Gettysburg and a second for the last Thursday in November.
Neither Lincoln nor his successors, however, established the holiday as a fixed annual event. Each President still had to proclaim and designate the date for observance of Thanksgiving year by year. Eventually the last Thursday in November persisted as the most customary date. In a controversial move President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared Thanksgiving 1939 to be the next-to-the-last Thursday in November as an effort with mercenary intent to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. Then two years later, in 1941, Congress responded by establishing the holiday with permanent assignment to the fourth Thursday in the month of November.
In a strange turn of events, by the turn of the 20th century, in some ways Thanksgiving had turned kind of creepy. Almost as we do for Halloween today, children and adults back then would dress up in masks and host costume crawls in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. In fact the tradition of children dressing up as poor people became so popular in New York that, for a time, Thanksgiving was nicknamed “Ragamuffin Day" there.
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>>> … and where are we today? <<<
Now nearly 400 years after that first celebration between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Native People of North America, the Thanksgiving of Plymouth Colony has evolved into a holiday centered around “going home” with all the sentiment and emotional content those two words imply. The Sunday following Thanksgiving is always the busiest travel day of the entire year in the United States. This year an estimated 46.9 million people will travel 50 miles or more from home during the Thanksgiving holiday, an increase of 300,000 over last year and the most since 2007, according to AAA Travel. Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, more than 10 million people typically take to the skies while another 40 million Americans drive 100 miles or more to share Thanksgiving dinner. The nation’s railways and bus lines, as well, teem with travelers going home for the holiday.
Every year football assumes a central role in Thanksgiving entertainment for many Americans. The idea to play on Thanksgiving started as a marketing ploy to spur attendance at games. The Detroit Lions started taking the field on Thanksgiving day in 1934, and the Dallas Cowboys followed in 1966. These days many people ask, "What would Thanksgiving be without a football game to try and stay awake for?"
Despite today's turmoil and the fast pace of living in the 21st century, gathering together with friends and family for a Thanksgiving celebration can offer a deeply meaningful and comforting annual ritual to many Americans. The need to connect with loved ones and to express gratitude for life's blessings can be found at the heart of all this feasting, prayerful thanks, recreation and even nostalgia for an earlier, simpler time.
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In upcoming articles here at Put the "Thanks" Back into Thanksgiving, we will look at interventions and plans that can make the celebration more meaningful — and possibly healthier too — for your family this year. Please follow this series to see holiday suggestions from activities to recipes, all of them designed to provide you with an improved game plan and a relaxed approach to Thanksgiving Day 2015.