Christmas Creep and Other Joyous Holiday Traditions

[We repost this piece by Eric Schultz, which originally appeared on November 19, 2013.]
Eric B. Schultz

Not long ago, a friend sent me a video which featured a new holiday character, “Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus,” with a note saying how appalled he was with the way retailers had hijacked

the holidays.

I’m pretty jaded myself by holiday retailers. But even I’ve winced a few times this fall.  There was the Christmas wrapping-paper sale I stumbled upon in mid-October, for example, and the recent news that many large retailers would be opening their doors at 8 or 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening.  (Who’s going to eat cold turkey sandwiches with me?)  Now, I’d been introduced to the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus offering proof positive that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas had finally been smashed together into the twisted wreckage of one long retail extravaganza.

Remember the time when Christmas was simple and less commercial, when you could step out of your door into a Currier and Ives print.  No?  How about a $29 Thomas Kinkade “Memories of Christmas” print?  Precisely.  One of the greatest of all holiday traditions is recalling a holiday season—historian Stephen Nissenbaum reminds us in his superb book, The Battle For Christmas—that never existed at all.

The History of National Thanksgiving

[Here we repost a piece on the history of Thanksgiving that originally appeared on Thursday November 25, 2010]  
Heather Cox Richardson

Anyone who cares about the history of Thanksgiving generally knows that the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags shared a feast in fall 1621, and that early American leaders periodically declared days of thanksgiving when settlers were supposed to give their thanks for continued life and—with luck—prosperity.

The story of how Thanksgiving became a national holiday is fuzzier. I’ve always heard that Lincoln proclaimed a national holiday in 1863, but just how and why was never clear.

The answer is that Lincoln appears essentially to have been pushed into declaring a national holiday in 1863. With that pressure behind him, he recognized that he could use a holiday for an important political statement. Consummate politician that he was, he did so. But he did not stop there. Lincoln pivoted his political statement to express a larger vision of what America should stand for.

Here is how it happened:

An astonishing seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays in November and December of 1862. The war was going badly for the Union, but the armies still held. Leaders recognized the need to acknowledge the suffering, and yet to keep Americans loyal to the cause. New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions. . . . Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.” (NYT, 11/27/1862, p. 8)

Rebunking the Pilgrims?

One from the vaults: we repost Randall Stephens's contribution, which originally appeared on November 24, 2009.
[crossposted at Religion in American History]
Randall Stephens

As Americans prepare to stuff their faces with turkey, pie, turkey pie, and all manner of bread-related foods, and clock in millions of hours of TV football viewing, it’s worth considering the Pilgrims, originators of America's holiday. (I was just thinking that a Martian would have a very hard time understanding how football and overeating are linked to an otherworldly religious sect.) How do Pilgrims fit into American history and religious history in general?

How low the founders of our national myth have fallen. Nineteenth-century Protestants celebrated the Pilgrims as hearty, pure-of-heart forbearers. Yet even in the 19th century Pilgrims had their share of detractors. Eli Thayer, the Kansas prophet, and the Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale fussed about the place of Pilgrims in American history. Every lowly Kansan (which I proudly count myself among) had more grit and determination and was more deserving of panegyrics than were the not-all-that-great Pilgrims.

How the Pilgrims Repented of Socialism and Gave Thanks

[This post originally appeared on November 20, 2013, on the Faith and History blog, and is reposted here with the permission of the author]
Robert Tracy McKenzie

As I promised in my last post, I want to share some thoughts about Rush Limbaugh’s recent book, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans. Released just three weeks ago, the book by the popular conservative radio host is now the second best-selling work on Amazon and has already elicited 470 reader reviews, nearly 90% of which are five-star raves. They praise it as a “factually correct,” “unbiased,” “true history” that will help to combat the “liberal propaganda that the children are being fed today.” (These are all comments that appear within the last twenty-four hours.)

What strikes me about these responses is how utterly confident the reviewers are in the historical accuracy of a work of children’s literature that centers on the adventures of a time-traveling talking horse. There are no footnotes. No bibliography. No list of suggested readings. No evidence of any kind.

Historical evidence, for most of us, is sort of like the foundation of a house. I remember when my wife and I were ready to buy our first home. In the back of my mind, I knew that the structure needed to rest on a firm foundation, but I didn’t waste much time thinking about it. I was a lot more concerned about floor plans and color schemes and square footage, and I remember being irritated when someone suggested that I should look underneath our dream home before buying it. (“You want me to crawl where?”) I think we tend to shop for history in much the same way. If a particular history book reinforces convictions that we already hold, it rarely enters our mind to investigate the underlying evidence. No need to go down in the crawl space when the rest of the house is so appealing.

A Seat at the Table of the Nation

Steven Cromack

Thanksgiving approaches. In schools across the country, students are learning about the Pilgrims with their black buckle hats, the Indians with their feathers, and a feast in which both groups came together in peace and harmony. At this first thanksgiving, both groups celebrated the bountiful blessings of company and friendship, while the Pilgrims gave thanks to their gracious God. Students learn of the first thanksgiving proclamation made by President Washington, and that, since then, Thanksgiving has become part of our national tradition.

The reality is that the Thanksgiving holiday, as we know it today, comes from Sara Josepha Hale, a nineteenth-century journalist, who petitioned President Lincoln for a national day of thanks, and singlehandedly linked giving thanks with eating turkey and pies.

Although many attribute the first thanksgiving to the Pilgrims, that celebration was nothing more than a harvest festival. In his book, We Gather Together: The Story of Thanksgiving, anthropologist Ralph Linton outlined the harvest festivals celebrated in the Old World. In the Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, English, and Slavic traditions, there appears an annual harvest festival of feasting and giving thanks. In the same way, the Pilgrims, who carried with them their Old World traditions, were naturally going to have harvest festivals and give thanks for their blessings.

In 1895, Reverend William DeLoss Love wrote a comprehensive history of the New England harvest festivals. He noted that the 1621 event, “was not a thanksgiving at all, judged by their Puritan customs, which they kept in 1621; but as we look back upon it after nearly three centuries, it seems so wonderfully like the day we love that we claim it as the progenitor of our harvest feasts” (69). Reverend Love, instead, would have more realistically been familiar with the events of a few decades earlier and one prominent journalist.

Nineteenth-century journalist Sara Josepha Hale invented the thanksgiving that exists today. Hale was the editor of Godey’s Lady's Book, the nation’s premiere magazine for nineteenth-century women. In it, she published numerous editorials urging the nation to set aside the last Thursday in November as a day of thanks. In the September 1860 edition of Godey, Hale wrote, “THANKSGIVING—the new National Holiday.—We must advert once more to this grand object of nationalizing Thanksgiving Day, by adopting, as a permanent rule, the last Thursday in November in all the States.” In addition to this one, she had published similar petitions in Godey’s since 1855. One reader wrote Hale in November of 1859, “DEAR MADAM: Your admirable suggestions in relation to the simultaneous observance of Thanksgiving Day over the whole Union have, before this, made a deep, and, let us trust, an abiding impression in the most influential and desirable quarters.” Hale also published a cookbook titled Mrs. Hale’s New Cook Book, with recipes for turkey and sweet potatoes. In an effort to make permanent her desire for a national holiday, she wrote over forty years worth of letters to governors and presidents.

Finally, in 1863, President Lincoln recognized the political advantage to having a national day of thanks. In 1863, he declared, “I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.” For Lincoln, appealing to the nation and God to give thanks was an attempt to start a healing process for a nation still embroiled in a bloody Civil War. In 1864, Lincoln made a similar proclamation. After Lincoln’s assassination, Hale wrote President Johnson and made the same request. As a result, every president following Lincoln, because of Hale’s letter writing, made thanksgiving proclamations in November. Thanksgiving, therefore, became a yearly tradition with Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation. Congress finally made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1941.

It is because of Sara Josepha Hale, not the Pilgrims, that we eat turkey on the last Thursday of November. Thanksgiving only became a yearly tradition in the mid nineteenth-century. Her four-decade campaign changed the nation, and yet, not one American history textbook even mentions her enormous contribution to our tradition. Hale used Thanksgiving to bring the nation together. She wrote in 1857, “Last year, nearly all States and Territories united on that day. This year, we trust, there will be no blank in this number, nor a seat left vacant at the Table of the Nation.”

Further Reading:

Excerpts of Hale’s editorials, as well as letters written to her by readers, are online:
http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/godey/shtable/shtable-thanks.html

William DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England. New York:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1895.

Holiday Hiatus

.
The HS blog is on a brief hiatus for the holiday. Enjoy these past posts on Thanksgiving.

Heather Cox Richardson, "The History of National Thanksgiving," November 25, 2010

Heather Cox Richardson, "Pre-Holiday Stress Relief," November 24, 2010

Randall Stephens, "Rebunking the Pilgrims?" November 24, 2009

Pre-Holiday Stress Relief

Heather Cox Richardson

When I was in graduate school, the story circulated that one of our very few female professors had protested the scheduling of a committee meeting on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. “The next day is Thanksgiving,” she reportedly told the room full of male colleagues. She then asked: “Just who cooks in your house?”

We thought she was brilliant (and the meeting time got changed).

In honor of everyone stressing about the upcoming holiday, for whatever reason, I offer some classic moments in the popular culture of Thanksgiving:

There was the problem of commercial advertising, covered brilliantly by WKRP in Cincinnati, when the station manager decided to hold a turkey giveaway:

There’s the problem of politics, expertise, and celebrity. This was covered well by West Wing, when the President checks out the Butterball hotline:

And then there’s the problem of dissent in a democracy. This was covered, of course, in the all-time classic "Alice’s Restaurant." (Updated here. Would embed it here, but that's been disabled.)

Enjoy.