October has come and gone, and with it, the students of Kirkwood Community College turn their attention from the macabre merriment of Halloween to the coming banquets of Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving break is a reprieve for students in every corner of the country; either as a brief pause from the struggle of their studies, or a desperately needed chance to catch up on late work. Others may spend most of their time traveling to gather with distant family and friends. This is after all one of the key premises of Thanksgiving.
For generations, the first Thanksgiving has been a common classroom tale. Kirkwood History Professor Jed Peterson recounted the story. In December of 1620, the Puritan pilgrims from England disembarked from the Mayflower in what is now Massachusetts, and founded the Plymouth Bay Colony. Over the next year, the Puritans had numerous encounters with the Wampanoag Indian Tribe. Between the two, a sort of pact was made to help establish the colony.
Thanks to the efforts of both the Puritans and the Wampanoag, enough food was cultivated by the end of the next year to sustain the colony for the winter. To celebrate this success, the Puritans and the Wampanoag arranged a large feast to be attended by both parties in November of 1621. This is the story known to most.
However, little is definitively known about the first Thanksgiving, other than that it happened. “We don’t actually have any sources from that meeting. We know it did happen. There’s enough retellings of the story later and enough connections from all sides, that we feel that this did happen,” said Peterson.
Expectedly, some major disconnects exist between the first Thanksgiving and the holiday we know today, along with some misconceptions about the event itself. “I think one of the big fallacies that we think of, is that this happened, and then there’s this long trajectory every year that in November sometime of us all gathering together. Nothing could be further from the truth,” continued Peterson.
Thanksgiving as a holiday did not exist in the United States until Oct. 3, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln created it in the hopes of inspiring a sense of Union among Americans in the midst of the Civil War.
The Battle of Gettysburg had been fought only three months earlier, and the States were at the peak of division. Thanksgiving was then solidified in the American calendar as the fourth Thursday in November by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 as an element of the New Deal. “It was actually later in the year, and then they moved earlier so that you could do more shopping, so people could buy more Christmas presents so the economy would recover faster,” Peterson elaborated.
Though primarily observed in the United States, Thanksgiving as we know it today is a unique holiday, in that it places no limits or exclusions on who may observe it.
Peterson said, “I think one of my favorite things about Thanksgiving is that it is a secular holiday. It’s not connected to a religion, it’s not connected to a political event, it’s not connected to anything at all.”
Though the peace between the Puritans and the Wampanoag did not last, the first Thanksgiving presented an idea that has lived on to this day.
Thanksgiving has come to represent a brief setting aside of differences between peoples and cultures in the spirit of giving thanks for what has been achieved during the year. Thanksgiving is a holiday that is open to all, and the more the merrier.
Categories: Feature
