Giving Thanks to God
Many and varied are the claims and imaginings that have been advanced to elucidate and romance the origins and character of Thanksgiving Day. The observance remains unique to America save for Puerto Rico. Canada has long had an annual holiday of the same name but on a different day and often with a very different intent, such as celebrating their continued blessing in having a monarchy. At one point even a Roman Pontiff, Pius XII in 1949, opined forlornly: “Would that it were universal” but he never took any concrete steps to promote it.
From the eighteenth century, only two descriptions of thanksgiving dinners have been unearthed and they are sharply contrasting. During the Revolutionary War, on December 18, 1777, a day of thanksgiving in honor of the American military victory at Saratoga was promulgated. One soldier, Joseph Plumb Martin, noted in his journal that, “Each man was given half a gill of rice and a tablespoonful of vinegar.”1 This is not quite the menu expected nowadays. So, it is felicitous that the other account from that period, from 1784, portrays a rather more extravagant celebration: “What a sight of pigs and geese and turkeys, and fowls and sheep must be slaughtered to gratify the voraciousness of a single day.”2
The tradition of having both Thanksgiving and Christmas does perhaps invite over indulgence. But then again, with merely Christmas to celebrate in Britain, the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, upon being asked this week about the nation’s “obesity crisis,” clearly felt we should pray well and be thin. With his customary tact, he roundly declared that the real cause of the nation’s weight problem was the spiritual void left by the Church of England and its failure to provide spiritual sustenance so that the people gorge themselves instead. So, we have been warned and we neglect thanksgiving at our peril!
But for all the romantic notions about the earliest Thanksgivings here in the United States, it should be remembered that the original settlers were mostly austere dissenters. New England Puritans did indeed observe days of thanksgiving, but usually in response to specific events, such as a military victory, a good harvest, or a providential rainfall, and each day of thanksgiving was mainly a solemn religious day celebrated through attendance at church and prayer with quite possibly more fasting than feasting. Then again, earnestness has never been the sole prerogative of puritans. Rather later, the American Society for the Advancement of Atheism, in token of its severe reaction to the religious character of the holiday, held a “blame giving service” on the basis that it would be good to bring to remembrance a list of things that were not good!
And indeed, at its heart, the day and the prior tradition from which it emerged, has always been less about feasting than about giving thanks to God for the blessings of this life as the name suggests. Going back to Columbus, the Discoverer and its crew sang a Te Deum on landing at San Salvador Island in 1492 – and as far back as Moses in the Old Testament, we find the Israelites being told in thanksgiving to make an offering to God of a portion of their harvests.
It is fitting thus to call to mind the first Thanksgiving Proclamation issued by the Continental Congress on November 1, 1777. Written by Samuel Adams, it comprised one sentence of 360 words, reading in part:
“Forasmuch as it is the indispensable duty of all men to adore the superintending providence of Almighty God; to acknowledge with gratitude their obligation to him for benefits received…together with penitent confession of their sins, whereby they had forfeited every favor; and their humble and earnest supplications that it may please God through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance…it is therefore recommended…to set apart Thursday the eighteenth day of December next, for solemn thanksgiving and praise, that with one heart and one voice the good people may express the grateful feeling of their hearts and consecrate themselves to the service of their Divine Benefactor…acknowledging with gratitude their obligations to Him for benefits received….To prosper the means of religion, for the promotion and enlargement of that kingdom which consisteth ‘in righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost’.”
The Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
Rector
1 Joseph Plumb Martin, Private Yankee Doodle; Being a Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier, George F. Scheer, ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1962), 100.
2 Letter from Shubael Breed, Norwich, Connecticut, to Mason Fitch Cogswell, New York.