Reflections of Thanksgiving

The United States may not be the only nation in the world to recognize a fall harvest celebration that is referred to as Thanksgiving, but the American Thanksgiving holiday is undoubtedly a unique and special day of remembering God’s provision and expressing gratitude for the bounty of His blessings. Most other countries that observe a special Thanksgiving holiday do so for secular reasons. For instance, Japan celebrates Kinrō Kansha no Hi (Labor Thanksgiving Day) to honor workers for their contributions to society. It’s more akin to the American holiday of Labor Day than to the traditional ideas we affirm with Thanksgiving. While a few other cultures engage in festivities of appreciation for the yield of their harvests, the uniqueness of the American holiday rests in its distinctly Christian background. 

Even though the American observance of Thanksgiving has its origin in gratitude to God, the modern holiday has become associated with several activities that have little or nothing to do with God. For some, the modern observance of Thanksgiving is about a long weekend and overindulgence in a homecooked meal, while others see it as a day of parades and football games, and still others consider it the gateway to Christmas or the day of calmness before an ensuing storm of shopping. Perhaps a reminder of the origin of Thanksgiving would insulate us from the growing movement to secularize this day and better enable us to observe it with the thankfulness the Lord deserves. 

Early Occasions of Thanksgiving 

The very mention of Thanksgiving provokes imagery among most people of a hearty band of Pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Mayflower and ultimately landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. While the heroic story of these Pilgrim Forefathers is meaningful and important (as we shall see below), theirs is neither the first nor the only instance in which gratitude for the Lord’s provision was celebrated. For example, farmers in medieval England participated in an annual Harvest Home festival to both celebrate and give thanks when the final crops of the season were gathered. Similar festivities were a part of life among other rural peoples in the era before the Pilgrim settlers of New England. 

Another notion of special Thanksgiving days emerged in the years after England’s King Henry VIII removed the English church from papal authority and established the Church of England in the sixteenth century. As many Catholic traditions and practices continued to be a part of the English church, a segment of the fellowship that sought to purify the church from Catholic influences became known as the Puritans. One of the traditions the Puritans wished to eradicate from the English church was the liturgical calendar with its various church holidays. To the Puritans, a better alternative was the occasional use of special Days of Humiliation to seek God’s care or protection and Days of Thanksgiving in appreciation of divine favor. These Days of Thanksgiving were regular occurrences among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritans as responses to God’s guidance and protection. 

Even on the American continent, there were other celebrations of Thanksgiving before the arrival of the Pilgrims in late 1620. Several sixteenth-century parties of Spanish explorers in the Southwestern United States paused after their New World arrivals to hold worship services and celebrations of thankfulness. Also, in 1619, when the English settlers of the Berkeley Plantation disembarked from the ship Margaret onto the shores of Virginia, they held a time of worship that included a specific day they called Thanksgiving. Within their charter for establishing a colony in what would become the Eastern United States, they wrote, “The day of our ships arrival at the place assigned for plantation in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.” Their annual celebration of Thanksgiving ended abruptly, however, when the settlement was destroyed by Indians in 1622. 

The Thanksgiving We Think We Know 

Though the earlier instances of Thanksgiving celebrations briefly described above are largely unknown in popular thought, the story of the Pilgrims and their “First Thanksgiving” in the fall of 1621 is widely recognized by even young school children. But the question we need to ask is whether the story we think we know is what actually took place. 

Like the Puritans, the Brownists (who would later be identified as the Pilgrims) were convinced the Church of England retained too much influence from Roman Catholicism. Unlike the Puritans who believed they could purify the Church of England by cleansing it of its Catholic vestiges, the Brownists were convinced the English church was too far gone for purification and must be replaced by a new church that focused greater attention on Scripture and Christian service. As a result, they sought to separate their faith community from the Church of England, which left them to become known as Separatists. 

Because of the close connection between the church and state in seventeenth-century England, the Separatist movement was considered seditious for refusing to worship in the state-sanctioned Church of England. Laws against dissent led to arrests and persecutions of the Separatists. At great expense and personal risk, the Separatists escaped to Holland in 1608 with the hope of finding religious freedom. The Separatists remained in Holland, initially in Amsterdam but primarily in Leiden, for twelve years but were unhappy to find that their children were adopting both Dutch language and customs. So, having heard the romantic tales of earlier explorers, the Brownites elected to journey to the New World to find a suitable settlement for raising their children within an English culture that allowed for their Separatist beliefs. 

While yet in Holland, the Separatists secured the Speedwell, a passenger ship, and the Mayflower, a cargo ship, to transport them to America, where they had secured financing from investors for the creation of a new colony near the mouth of the Hudson River (which was then a part of the Virginia settlement). After two failed attempts to cross the Atlantic due to the Speedwell taking on water, the group was forced to abandon the Speedwell, leave some of the would-be colonists behind, and combine the rest of the company into the Mayflower for their New World journey. The Mayflower departed from Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620, with 102 passengers (only thirty-seven Separatists) and thirty crew members. Though blown off course by stormy seas, the Mayflower arrived at Cape Cod on November 11, 1620, after sixty-five difficult days at sea. 

With uncertainties about what would befall them with their new settlement, the Mayflower’s passengers formed a civil covenant that allowed for the democratic election of a governor, the creation and enforcement of community laws, and an agreement to cooperate “for the general good of the colony unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.” The Mayflower Compact was one of the world’s first written constitutions and has been recognized by many as foundational to American democracy. It served as the Plymouth colony’s governing document until 1691, when the colony was absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay colony. 

After a period of exploration, the weary travelers settled on a sight previously cleared and inhabited by the Patuxet Indians, a part of the Wampanoag Confederation. The former village was abandoned by the Native Americans three years earlier when a devastating plague wiped out an estimated ninety percent of the Native American population in the region. The Pilgrims named the location Plymouth (although the Plymouth Rock landing is totally mythical), after the city from which they departed, and hurriedly built shelters in which they hoped to survive the challenges of a New England winter. 

The winter months between the Pilgrims’ landing and the spring of 1621 proved to be difficult as roughly half of the Plymouth colonists perished. To their good fortune, however, the month of March brought both better weather and an unexpected visit from Samoset, a Native American who had learned English from fishermen in the area and was able to greet the Pilgrims in their own language. Samoset introduced the Pilgrims to Massasoit, the Wampanoag Tribe’s chief with whom they would sign a peace treaty, and Tisquantum (better known as Squanto), the only surviving member of the Patuxet Tribe who escaped the devastating plague and learned the English language while in England. Throughout the summer of 1521, Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to successfully cultivate corn, squash, and beans, as well as how to catch and process fish and seafood. He also helped them build better housing and was referred to by Governor William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 as “a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectations.” 

The occasion immortalized as the “First Thanksgiving” was a three-day event that occurred at some point in the fall of 1621. Two accounts of the celebration survive, one in Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation and another in a letter by colonist Edward Winslow. Neither account refers to the event as “thanksgiving,” but both make it clear it was a time of celebrating God’s provision. In addition to the fifty or so surviving colonists, Winslow’s letter reports that Massasoit attended the feast with around ninety Indians (some insist that they were invited to the feast while others believe they simply showed up). The unfolding of the celebration included feasting on wild game (deer, fowl, fish, etc.), games and activities, and a general appreciation for the abundance of God’s blessings. 

An additional, and more religious approach to thanksgiving was held in late July 1623, when the Pilgrims’ prayers for rain amid a summer drought were answered. Additionally, as the population of New England grew during the later seventeenth century, more special days of public thanksgiving became common at various times of year. Moreover, an annual harvest festival began to be observed in New England in the late 1660s. The original proclamations of thanksgiving in the American colonies were largely the result of religious leaders, though political leaders in the latter eighteenth century began to make similar appeals for thanksgiving days. 

The American Thanksgiving Holiday 

President George Washington declared November 26, 1789, the first National Day of Thanksgiving for the United States, proclaiming it “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty God.” Many of Washington’s successors in the White House also declared a national Thanksgiving Day at the end of November, but Thanksgiving did not become a federal holiday until December 26, 1941, when Franklin Roosevelt signed into law a bill that officially declared the fourth Thursday of November to be Thanksgiving. 

Many of us like to imagine that our modern Thanksgiving celebration has roots that stretch deep into the soil of the Pilgrim festivities of 1621, but that unbroken connection really doesn’t exist. In fact, the 1621 celebration was not referred to as the “First Thanksgiving” until 1841 and the notion of a national Thanksgiving Holiday didn’t emerge until many years later. While the modern holiday may not have a direct link to the early Separatists of Massachusetts, the commemoration of what became known as the “First Thanksgiving” and their appreciation for God’s provision eventually inspired our modern holiday.