[Music]
Thanksgiving wasn't always like it is today. The domestic family meal, the football, the parade,
leftovers, Black Friday. Like Christmas, it used to be a holiday of festivals, outdoor revelry and drinking.
And much like today's Halloween. In fact, children would dress up in costumes and go begging
for money or treats.
If you were growing up in 19th century New York City, you might see a group of cross dressers
called the fantasticals marching the city streets, ridiculing authority figures.
It wasn't until the mid 1800s that Sarah Josepha Hale, the godmother of Thanksgiving as we know it,
started writing her famous editorials in Godey's Magazine, recontextualizing the holiday as a domestic
occasion, one in which distant sons and daughters returned home for a family feast.
She urged governors and presidents to adopt the last Thursday in November as a national holiday
and her letters shake with notes of urgency and despair as the country slid into civil war.
Thanksgiving, she hoped, might hold together under the banners of brotherhood and gratitude a fragile union.
It didn't work, of course, but in 1863 President Lincoln did make Thanksgiving a federal holiday,
a point of pride for Union states than for the rest of the country as it rebuilt after the war.
Hale, Lincoln and others of that period effectively rewrote Thanksgiving as something that happens
indoors with families, a joyful reuniting but no longer a raucous one.
The tectonic changes of the industrial and commercial revolutions were pulling families apart, they felt,
threatening to weaken the ties and values that grounded the nation.
Over the next decades into the 20th century, Thanksgiving lost its tolerance for begging children
and drunken marchers and picked up new traditions like annual football games and the Macy's Day Parade.
Teachers taught the story of Thanksgiving to their students, many of whom urged their immigrant parents
to celebrate the national ritual, a way of stirring patriotism.
And as with all forms of assimilation, foreign cultures are both absorbed into and erased by
the dominant culture.
The Thanksgiving turkey and its many side dishes are a great metaphor for these twin tendencies.
Many brought dishes from their own cultures into the feast to remember their diverse pasts,
as long as the turkey reigned over all.
This is all to say that traditions like Thanksgiving aren't natural by any means.
They're invented, and at the time of their invention they call to a past that's not really there.
An imagined past, a constructed authenticity that serves the purposes of the present.
Indeed, even the awareness of such traditions is a relatively modern phenomenon, anchoring points for
a culture in constant or progressively more rapid change.
There's a lot in the DNA of Thanksgiving worth holding onto, but there's a lot of which we'd be better off
without: A rosy and false account of our early settlers' friendship with the Native Americans,
an ideology of female domesticity and an anachronistic remnant of the separate spheres way of thinking
that said a woman's rightful place was at home in front of the stove, the assimilation of other cultures, races
and classes into a largely white and largely Protestant system of thinking.
For me, the core of Thanksgiving is family. The family I was born into, the family I chose, the community I live in
and the nation that gives me the freedom to think through and, if I want, criticize its values.
These days, in the wake of terror around the world, when our worst reactionary tendencies are flared by those
far too willing to stoke fear and anger, it's worth remembering, I think, just how many different families
we all belong to. We may be celebrating in separate homes but in reality, each family in America blends into
the next. If the history of Thanksgiving show us anything, it's that holidays like these are open to revision
As Americans, Thanksgiving is ours to reframe, just as the country is. That's an important responsibility
for all of us, a responsibility for which I give thanks.
Hey everybody, thanks for watching and Happy Thanksgiving to everybody out there!
I hope you're with your families or with people that you love. I'm going home to my family and I can't wait to see
all them. If you want to support the Nerdwriter, if you think that the Nerdwriter is something that you're not
seeing anywhere else on YouTube or the Internet, you can go right here and pledge to my Patreon page
as little as a dollar per video. Everything helps. You guys have been amazing, so thank you for that.
This money goes towards improving the channel and making better and better and better videos
and I hope you guys are seeing a return on what you're giving to me because it's very, very generous
and I don't take it lightly.
So, thank you guys again. Happy Thanksgiving and I'll see you next Wednesday.