An article in The Boston Globe, on Thanksgiving Day, 2001, reported a puzzling remark by a New England historian. He was quoted as saying that our customary Thanksgiving celebration, in the style of the Pilgrims, was in fact quite alien to most of New England until the late 1800s. According to this historian, the Pilgrims’ Plymouth Bay Colony was soon overshadowed by the much larger Massachusetts Bay Colony of the Puritans. And as a consequence, the history of the Pilgrims was also overshadowed and not resurrected until Victorian times.

Like so many things that get reported in the newspapers these days, this didn’t seem to make much sense. What could this historian mean, that our traditional Thanksgiving had been forgotten and had become alien, even in New England?

To be sure, our celebration of Thanksgiving as an annual and national holiday is usually traced to President Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation of Thanksgiving on October 3, 1863, where he proposed that on November 26th, the great gifts given to the nation “be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people.” But Lincoln was himself invoking an earlier history. His great burden was to preserve the Union. And following the sacrifice of lives at Gettysburg in July, 1863, Lincoln must have remembered President George Washington’s Proclamation of Thanksgiving in 1789, calling on the nation to give thanks for the new United States brought into being that year by the new Constitution. It surely was not simple coincidence that the day Lincoln selected for his own proclamation, and the day he set aside for Thanksgiving, were identical to Washington’s Proclamation in 1789. And the historical thread runs even further to the past. Proclamations of days of Thanksgiving date back at least to 1676, when the governing council of Charlestown, Massachusetts, set June 29th “as a day of Solemn Thanksgiving and praise to God for such His Goodness and Favour,” for having protected the town from the Indians during King Philip’s War.

So given this long historical thread, how could one say that our traditional Thanksgiving had been forgotten, even in New England? Well, it is true. We have become so accustomed to our version of Thanksgiving that when we read over those earlier proclamations, we fail even to see the most obvious thing — they are all solemn days set aside for prayer. Not one mentions a Thanksgiving feast. Indeed, one source speaks of these Thanksgiving days as days of fasting.

The Thanksgiving Feast — that is what we get from the Pilgrims, and that is the custom that was resurrected in the 1800s. And we owe it all to a brief paragraph composed by one of the members of the original Plymouth Colony in “A Letter Sent from New England to a Friend,” December 1621:

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty. ... These things I thought good to let you understand, ... that you might in our behalf give God thanks Who hath dealt so favorably with us.