The Story of Thanksgiving
Most of us grow up with the idea that Thanksgiving started with one perfect meal in Plymouth in 1621, but the real story is much wider and messier. Long before the Pilgrims, Europeans in North America were already holding religious “thanksgivings” to mark survival, safe journeys, and good harvests.
Spanish colonists held thanksgiving masses in places like St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, and in 1598 a Spanish expedition in what is now Texas marked its survival with a feast shared with local Native people. In 1619, English settlers at Berkeley Hundred in Virginia were ordered by their charter to hold a prayer service of thanksgiving upon arrival and every year after, more than a year before Plymouth’s famous feast.
What Really Happened in Plymouth in 1621
The 1621 Plymouth event that later gets branded as “The First Thanksgiving” was a three-day harvest celebration, not a formal religious thanksgiving the way the Pilgrims usually defined it. About 52 English colonists and at least 90 Wampanoag people, led by Ousamequin (Massasoit), gathered to mark a successful harvest that was only possible because of Indigenous knowledge about local crops like corn.
Almost everything we know about that feast comes from a short letter by Edward Winslow, which mentions “fowl” and deer but says nothing about pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, or half the dishes we now consider “traditional.” The Wampanoag presence came in the context of a fragile political alliance after years of epidemic disease that had devastated Native communities, making the famous shared meal a brief moment of cooperation inside a much harsher colonial reality.
From Scattered Traditions to a National Idea
In the 1600s and 1700s, New Englanders developed a pattern of occasional “thanksgiving” days, usually declared by local authorities and focused on church services, long sermons, and a Sabbath-like break from work. These days existed alongside “days of humiliation” and fasting during droughts or crises, so gratitude and repentance were officially balanced throughout the year.
At the national level, George Washington issued a one-time Thanksgiving proclamation in 1789, and presidents like John Adams and James Madison followed with their own occasional days of thanks, but there was still no annual, country-wide holiday. Over time, New England’s autumn thanksgivings complete with turkey and family meals became a cultural export, setting the template for what a future national Thanksgiving might look like.
Sarah Josepha Hale and Lincoln Make It National
The person who really pushed Thanksgiving over the top was Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book and the most persistent Thanksgiving lobbyist you’ve probably never heard of. Starting in the 1840s, she wrote editorials, printed recipes, and sent letters to governors and presidents arguing for a fixed national Thanksgiving that could act as a “Union Festival” to help hold the country together.
In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, Hale finally got a president to act. Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring a national Day of Thanksgiving to be observed on the last Thursday of November, explicitly connecting it to both gratitude and the hope of healing a divided nation. From that point on, presidents followed his lead and declared Thanksgiving every year, so the holiday functioned as a de facto national tradition even though it still wasn’t locked into law.
Date Fights, Native Perspectives, and the Thanksgiving We Know
By the 20th century, Thanksgiving was firmly entrenched, complete with family dinners, parades, and increasingly, the unofficial kickoff of the Christmas shopping season. That economic angle exploded into public view in 1939, when Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to move Thanksgiving one week earlier to lengthen the shopping season during the Great Depression, causing states to split between the old and new dates until Congress finally fixed the holiday on the fourth Thursday in November in 1941.
At the same time, the story of Thanksgiving was being smoothed into a comforting myth that centered on friendly Pilgrims and “Indians” while downplaying colonization, violence, and broken treaties. Many Native people now use the day as a time of mourning or remembrance, and Wampanoag voices in particular have pushed for a more honest telling that keeps both the 1621 feast and the much larger Indigenous experience in view. The Thanksgiving on our calendars today is the product of all of this. Colonial survival, religious traditions, a determined woman editor, a Civil War president, a retail-driven date fight, and an ongoing debate over how to remember the past.
Thanks for reading everyone 📖 Remember stay curoius and keep learning! Happy Thanksgiving 🦃
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Sources:
Thanksgiving Day | Meaning, History, & Facts — Encyclopedia Britannica
Thanksgiving: Historical Perspectives — National Archives Museum
History of Thanksgiving — Boston University Today
A Presidential History of Thanksgiving — Library of Congress / Headlines & Heroes
Rethinking Thanksgiving Celebrations: Native Perspectives — National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian)
Original article on Medium
