At its best, Thanksgiving is a reminder to think back on the things we love.
At its worst, Thanksgiving is an excuse to eat just disgusting amounts of food.
But how did we get to this point? Here's the untold truth of Thanksgiving.
The history of Thanksgiving is long and murky. Most Americans trace the
celebration of Thanksgiving to a celebratory feast the Pilgrims had in 1621 alongside their
Native allies the Wampanoags. But some feel that's an arbitrary starting point,
both because Native tribes already had their own much older traditions of giving thanks,
and because the first English colonizers to have a ceremonial Thanksgiving feast
were actually the settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1610.
Jamestown curator Merry Outlaw thinks the reason this Thanksgiving is forgotten is
because of the ghastly backstory. During a terrible winter, over 80 percent of
Jamestown's 300 settlers died in what is known as the Starving Time. To survive,
the increasingly desperate colonists resorted to eating rats, horses, shoe leather, and ultimately
human flesh. The famished few who lived were saved by British ships bearing food. The resulting
Thanksgiving celebration has sort of been papered over thanks to that whole cannibalism thing.
In 1619 Virginia had another thanksgiving service when Starving Time survivor Captain
John Woodlief journeyed to the Berkley settlement on business. This second celebration is the one
Virginians tend to recognize as the "first" American Thanksgiving - and probably will
until Soylent Green finally replaces turkey as the main Thanksgiving dish.
"You gotta tell 'em! Soylent Green is people!"
The peace and harmony between the Pilgrims and the Natives didn't last long. By 1623,
just two years after the famous Thanksgiving feast, tensions had broken out - tensions that
would lead to a terrible betrayal at another feast of friendship.
Captain Myles Standish, a short soldier with an even shorter temper, often did the Pilgrims'
dirty work. Suspicious and paranoid that the local Native tribes were planning to attack a
group of colonizers who had been stealing Native food, Standish invited Wituwamat and Pecksuot,
two of the Native leaders, to a private feast inside a hut to discuss matters.
It was a trick. Once the Natives were inside the hut, the Pilgrims barred the door and then
set upon Witwuamat and Pecksuot, stabbing them to death. Other Natives were hunted down and
hung. Standish then cut off Wituamat's head and mounted it on a pike in Plymouth as a warning.
The warning worked all too well: afraid that the English would murder them, many Native tribes
left their villages and fled. Unable to tend their crops, they went hungry, and hundreds of Natives,
including some of the Pilgrims' closest allies, died of starvation as a result.
Thanksgiving brings families together,
which often means… a lot of arguments and uncomfortable situations.
"I'd like us all to remember Grandma, I'm sure she's looking down on us and smiling."
“I hope it's the version of her before she was in the grips of dementia."
But long before your family was having their annual civil war around the dinner table,
Thanksgiving became a divisive issue in the lead-up to the actual Civil War.
Not yet a national holiday in the mid 1800s, Thanksgiving was primarily celebrated in New
England, which by then had become the center of the abolitionist movement.
According to the LA Times, several pro-slavery states embraced Thanksgiving during the 1840s,
but by the 1850s tensions over slavery had intensified and Thanksgiving had grown in
popularity across Northern states. As a result places like Virginia refused to celebrate
it. Multiple papers slammed the so-called "abolitionist" holiday, with one calling it
"little more than an occasion for indulgence in dissipation at the cost of character,
health and slenderly provided purses."
In 1863, following victories by the Union armies at Gettysburg and Vicksburg,
President Lincoln called for an end to the war and declared Thanksgiving a national celebration.
Now if only Lincoln were around to mediate your family dinners!
Meanwhile, our northern neighbor, Canada, has its own national day of gratitude. Like
the Yankee version, it includes family get-togethers and scrumptious meals,
so it might seem like a copycat. But actually, the roots of the Canaidan
Thanksgiving go back even further than the American one - all the way back to 1578.
It was in that year that an English pirate named Martin Frobisher set anchor off the
coast of Newfoundland. An explorer who became famous for plundering French trading vessels,
Frobisher and his men took refuge on Newfoundland. To celebrate their success, they commemorated the
moment with a Thanksgiving celebration- the first known Thanksgiving held by Europeans in America.
Frobisher eventually died fighting the Spanish, but his journey lived on in Canadian lore,
and the country officially adopted Thanksgiving as an annual celebration in 1879.
Playing and watching football on Thanksgiving is a tradition that goes back almost as far as the
national holiday itself, with games sprouting up just a few years after Lincoln's 1863 declaration.
Unfortunately, though, it hasn't always been all fun, as the love of Thanksgiving
football led to the worst disaster at a sporting event in American history.
In the 1890s, Stanford University and UC Berkeley developed a spirited gridiron rivalry,
playing every Thanksgiving. According to Stanford Magazine, in those days the competitions were
exclusively held in San Francisco with crowds much larger than the stadium could accommodate.
In 1897, thousands of fans climbed onto the roof of the stands, which collapsed.
But miraculously, nobody was killed, and only one person had to be hospitalized.
Nobody learned their lesson, though. Three years later, in the year 1900,
hundreds of fans who couldn't get seats climbed onto the roof of a nearby factory. It collapsed,
and dozens of people fell more than 50 feet, some landing on top of a 500 degree industrial furnace.
23 people died, most of them children and young men, with countless more injured and maimed.
A grand jury eventually ruled that it was
their own fault for being on the roof in the first place.
These days, everyone in America is so used to celebrating Thanksgiving on the fourth
Thursday of November that we just take it for granted. That's how it's always been, right?
Well, actually, no. And the change wasn't an easy one.
When Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving an official holiday back in 1863, he proclaimed that it would
take place on the last Thursday in November. This tradition lasted for decades. But during
the Depression, retailers began agitating for an earlier Thanksgiving in order to give them
a longer Christmas shopping season. So in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
officially changed Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday in November instead of the last one.
And people were not happy about it. Of the 48 states,
16 decided to just stick with the last Thursday of the month anyway,
while Texas and Colorado decided to have it both ways by celebrating both Thanksgivings,
two weeks in a row. Some declared the new date an imposter, calling it "Franksgiving," after FDR.
This went on for two years — during which obesity rates probably quadrupled in Texas and Colorado.
Kids love playing dress-up, which is partly why Halloween is so popular.
And strange as it sounds, Thanksgiving used to be an
occasion for kids to dress up in costume and go door-to-door trick-or-treating.
Yes, it's strange but true: From the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th
century, kids went out in costumes on Turkey Day, with an 1897 LA Times piece calling it, quote,
"the busiest time of the year for the manufacturers of and dealers in masks
and false faces." People in New York even called Thanksgiving "Ragamuffin
Day" because so many people dressed as beggars and stood on the streets asking for goodies.
By the 1940's, though, times had changed and the practice died out.
But if you ever go trick-or-treating and receive a bag of gravy, you'll know why!
Thanksgiving dinner was wartime propaganda
Norman Rockwell's iconic 1943 painting "Freedom from Want" perfectly captures the quintessential
view of a classic American Thanksgiving meal around the family dinner table. And it should,
because it was largely responsible for creating that idea in the first place.
That's because "Freedom From Want" wasn't art imitating life, it was art trying to
sell patriotism to drum up support for America's efforts in World War Two. And to do that, Rockwell
imagined a scene that actually wasn't that common for most of Thanksgiving history up to that point.
In fact, back in the day most people celebrated Thanksgiving dinner by dining out at fancy
restaurants; if possible, many even celebrated Thanksgiving dinner on cruise ships. It wasn't
until the Great Depression of the 1930's that people started having Thanksgiving dinner at home,
because they just didn't have the money to keep eating out.
"Freedom From Want" worked, though, and worked so well that it still remains
the image most people have of what Thanksgiving dinner is and should be.
A Day of Mourning
For many Americans, Thanksgiving is about appreciating the present and honoring a
mythical past. Their day of grateful gluttony pays vague homage to bygone
figures from a 17th-century feast steeped in wholesome imagery and wholesale revisionism.
But others are haunted by the ghost of Thanksgiving past and
atrocities that followed, as the peaceful Plymouth meal that we often associate
with Thanksgiving was the precursor to decades of slavery, sickness,
and genocide. According to Smithsonian Magazine, approximately 300,000 Native Americans in New
England alone met violent ends at the hands of Europeans, and even more were displaced.
Understandably, many Native Americans know Thanksgiving not as a holiday,
but as the Day of Mourning, or Unthanksgiving Day.
Native American actor Michael Horse of Twin Peaks fame told Newsweek that instead of feasting,
he and others attend a ceremony in remembrance of a three-year occupation of Alcatraz Island
aimed at turning it and its famous prison into a Native American cultural center. He said,
"It's about reflecting, remembering,
and celebrating that we are still here and our culture still survives."
Nixon nailed a turkey
The White House tradition of pardoning donated turkeys officially started in
1989 with President George H.W. Bush, but the idea predates his administration. In fact,
when JFK showed mercy to a turkey in 1963, the Washington Post called it a "pardon."
But it's not all fun and games. Because many Thanksgiving turkeys are overfed so
they will provide more dinner meat, getting a presidential pardon doesn't necessarily mean
a long life of retirement for the lucky bird. For instance, at least two of the
butterballs rescued from President Obama's dinner table were eight times bigger than
the average wild turkey, so they probably died prematurely due to morbid obesity.
And that's not even accounting for intentional cruelty perpetrated by the President himself:
Vietnam War villain Richard Nixon, a notorious turkey who received an actual presidential
pardon after Watergate, once had a live turkey's feet nailed to a table in order to restrain it.
It might have been kinder to just eat it.
'Black Friday' is not a term of endearment
Nowadays we know Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving,
as a time to go shop until you drop, or at least shop until someone drops
you with a roundhouse kick to the face for grabbing that last Playstation 5.
But though the urban legend claims that the term Black Friday refers
to the fact that retailers have their best sales day of the year,
and thus are "in the black," the actual reason for the name is less happy.
The original Black Friday took place in 1869, when a scheme to artificially inflate the price
of gold almost plunged America into a crippling depression. Then, in 1929, the stock market crash
that began on Black Thursday and continued through Black Tuesday started an actual Great Depression
that would last for more than a decade. This kind of naming convention continues to this day,
wth Black Monday stock market crashes taking place in 1987, 2008, and 2020.
So if Black Friday historically refers to an economic disaster,
why is it applied to the most profitable - and dangerous - shopping day of the year? Well,
it started as a sarcastic joke in the 1950's, as retailers began having so many of their employees
call out sick on the day after Thanksgiving that they took to calling it Black Friday.
The term really began catching on in 1966 when Philadelphia police used it to describe
the chaos of the shopping experience on the day after Thanksgiving. As a result,
people began actually staying away from the stores because the Black Friday nickname
made it sound too scary to go shopping. It was retail executive Peter Strawbridge who
reportedly flipped the script by coming up with the alternative narrative about
business profits being in the black — a neat bit of advertising that is still working to this day.
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