The harvest meal of 1621
In the autumn of 1621, the settlers at Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, whom later Americans called the PILGRIM fathers, celebrated their first harvest. About half of the people who had sailed on the Mayflower the year before had died over the winter. Around ninety men of the Wampanoag people, led by their leader Massasoit, joined the fifty or so surviving settlers, and the gathering lasted three days. The settlers had survived partly thanks to Tisquantum, or Squanto, a Patuxet man who had been kidnapped and taken to Europe years before, learned English, and returned to find his village emptied by disease. He showed them how to plant corn with fish buried as fertiliser. The one written account mentions deer brought by the Wampanoag and wild fowl, which might have included turkey, but there was almost certainly no pie, since the settlers had no ovens or sugar for it.
For many Native Americans the day recalls what followed: the loss of land and lives in the centuries after 1621. Since 1970, some have gathered at Plymouth each Thanksgiving for a National Day of Mourning.
The woman who made it a holiday
Thanksgiving only became a national holiday thanks to Sarah Josepha Hale, a magazine editor best remembered for writing the poem Mary Had a Little Lamb. She spent seventeen years writing letters to presidents and politicians. In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln finally agreed and declared a national day of thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November.
In 1939 President Franklin Roosevelt moved it a week earlier to give shops a longer Christmas season during hard times. Many states refused, and for two years Americans celebrated on different days; some called the new one Franksgiving. In 1941 Congress fixed it on the fourth Thursday of November. Our US presidents page covers both men. Canadians celebrate their Thanksgiving much earlier, on the second Monday in October.
Turkeys, parades and bouncing berries
Every year the President of the United States pardons a TURKEY, sparing it from the dinner table, a custom made official in 1989. The bird got its name through a mix-up with another bird bought from Turkish traders, as our farm animals page explains. New York's Thanksgiving PARADE began in 1924, and the first giant balloon, Felix the Cat, floated down the streets in 1927. American football is part of the day too: the Detroit Lions have played a game on Thanksgiving almost every year since 1934.
A CRANBERRY grows on low vines in sandy bogs. Ripe ones have pockets of air inside, so farmers test them by bouncing them: good berries bounce, and soft ones do not. At harvest, the bogs are flooded and the berries shaken loose, so they float to the surface in a red carpet to be scooped up.
The Thanksgiving FEAST usually means turkey with STUFFING and GRAVY, MASHED POTATOES, SQUASH, CORN and PUMPKIN PIE, followed by LEFTOVERS for days. Company legend at Swanson says that in 1953 it was left with a huge surplus of frozen turkey after Thanksgiving, and a salesman suggested packing it into trays with side dishes; the result was the first TV dinner. The HARVEST, the AUTUMN, a FAMILY BLESSING and feeling GRATEFUL and THANKFUL are what the day is meant to be about.