THANKSGIVING, as we know it began 1863; In 1620 it never really happened

 
 

After the grave Puritans arrived on the Mayflower and established Plimoth Plantation in 1620, they promptly began to issue all sorts of thanksgiving proclamations. These “celebrations” might be declared in observance of “a military victory, a good harvest, or a providential rainfall,” says Smith, but they were solemn days of prayer, not sumptuous meals shared with their First Nation brothers. 


 
It’s true that there does exist a letter/advertisement dated December, 1621, that mentions a big feast of wild fowl eaten with Native American king Massasoit and his men, and the missive has since been enshrined as evidence of the original thanksgiving feast.   But the purpose of this letter makes it suspect:   It was sent to England to attract more settlers to Plymouth Plantation.   Rather than the founding document of America’s a multicultural past, it’s something of a hyped-up real-estate advertisement.
T
The idea of a national day of feasting, family, and reflection belonged to the 19th century and was promulgated by an energetic writer named Sarah Josepha Hale. Best remembered by history for having penned the verses for “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” Hale also wrote the 1827 novel Northwood; a Tale of New England, which included an entire chapter on thanksgiving as a feast.  She laid out quite a spread: a roast turkey with stuffing, pumpkin pie, and “plates of pickles, preserves … and all the necessaries for increasing the seasoning of the viands to the demand of each palate.”   This florid passage established the template for the traditional turkey dinner, the same menu sentimentalized in Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting Freedom from Want. 
 
We still eat turkey with all the trimmings today largely thanks to Hale’s political acumen. She worked her connections all the way up to President Lincoln, to whom she wrote a personal letter persuading him to make thanksgiving a national holiday.   In 1863, a few months after the battle of Gettysburg,   Lincoln, in 1863 made a feast of thanksgiving a national holiday, declaring the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day Feast. (But why so late in the season—long after the the harvest season has succumbed to barren frost in many parts of the country?)
 
The idea of a thanksgiving feast, however, is older than Lincoln, Hale, or the Pilgrims. Indeed, buried beneath Rockwell’s layers of sentiment and piety are the dim outlines of pagan customs of autumnal gorging. The Celts, the Germanic tribes and the Greeks all had their own version of the harvest festival, and likely the idea of feasting to celebrate the end of communal work is as old as organized agriculture itself. A Thanksgiving Day Feast has ALWAYS existed in all civilized areas on earth, it has nothing to do with pilgrims and indians or even the United States at all.  ("Lasagna" was a traditional hay-harvest dish in the French Alps, where after a good day’s work you were said to have “earned your lasagna.”)
 


Author, Sarah Hale in 1863 conjured up a "thanksgiving feast" as a national holiday and President Lincoln put it through. Before this, there was NO thanksgiving day feast per se, in the 1600's. there was NO thanksgiving day feast per se, in the 1700's...as we know it today, it began in 1863 and for some reason it stuck. The story and plays put on and instructed in grammar schools throughout the 1900's is all a pack of lies.  Just a bunch of stories people made up along the way and were repeated so many times, the masses take them in as fact, even though NONE OF IT EVER HAPPENED.
 
RECENT DEVELOPMENT:  Thanksgiving Day is now "Shopping Day."   Black Friday, will now be Black Thursday and Black Friday!  K-mart will be open all day, closing from 4 - 8 p.m. only, so its employees can "feast" if they want to and then re-opening to $ell some more.  hmmmmm.  $$$$$$ sound familiar?