Thanksgiving is in many ways the most mysterious of all American holidays.
TV ads for department store sales typically show "jolly Pilgrims" and turkeys ecstatic together (over the demise of the latter), confirming our high school textbooks’ myth of the Thanksgiving holiday started by the “Pilgrim Fathers” who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century. Yet weren’t these “founders of our country” such notorious Puritans that they refused even to celebrate Christmas, fearing the temptations even of pious merriment?
Indeed. The only surviving book out of the original 400 donated by John Harvard to the Harvard University library, "The Christian Warfare Against the Devil World and Flesh," like the infamous "sinners in the hands of an angry god" sermons of preacher Jonathan Edwards, give a rather more accurate impression of the mindset of many of these original settlers. (So do the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne.)
Without further digression, the idea of "jolly Pilgrim" celebrations is clearly ludicrous. The only record of any kind of "thanksgiving" was a prayer service in the spring of 1621 given to celebrate survival of the unprepared settlers through their first extremely harsh New England winter. But as they would soon prove in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, the "pilgrims" were rather more interested in roasting witches than roasting turkeys.
So if it wasn't the Pilgrims' holiday, whose was it? Was not Thanksgiving itself a traditional harvest feast not of the English, but of the American Indians? That's an interesting thought...though not a happy one either. I mean, what thanks did the Indians ever get besides plagues, enslavement, banishment, plunder, and practically genocide for teaching their invaders the goodness and abundance of this land?
Not being an historian, I can only wonder: What is the truth? Just how exactly did we get from infamously dour Puritan abstemiousness to the Mickey Mouse float on the Macy’s Parades and Detroit Lions/Dallas Cowboys football games on Direct TV? I would be grateful to any more scholarly readers of ours who might care to enlighten me.
And does the truth even matter anymore in a world where myth so flagrantly trumps reality? By October 3, 1789, when George Washington ordered our new nation’s first Thanksgiving, legends of our noble forefathers joyously stuffing themselves as a patriotic duty were widespread (if intermittent: Jefferson didn’t celebrate it at all, and Southerners generally took to this “Yankee” custom poorly).
But ever since 1863, when Lincoln was struggling to rally the Union, our president, every last Thursday in November, proclaims a holiday for all Americans, regardless of creed or color, to unite in gluttonous gratitude. The custom that turkeys are eaten seems, from the research I have done, to have basically been started by President Roosevelt, apparently as a reward to fervent campaign supporters in the poultry business. And the tradition of a televised presidential pardon for one turkey in particular seems to have been started only by President Kennedy just days before his assassination in 1963, although, again we now somehow take the "turkey pardon" for granted, as if "the Pilgrims" invented this custom as well. As for the origin of the football game and the particular involvement of Mickey Mouse...although it seems to be the ancient custom in connection with this holiday to simply make things up and then claim "ancient custom"...sorry, I'm not running for president, so I see no shame in admitting that I just don't know. If anyone can tell me, I'd be most obliged.
Yet let us not indulge in too much irony, even as we indulge in too much food. For what a delicious irony it is indeed, that this holiday (supposedly) of those who tolerated no faith but their own is now quite universally if obliviously shared by all, of absolutely any faith or not even of any faith. For once in our complicated history, our promise is not far nobler than our result. True, Thanksgiving, like so much else in our lives, has been thoroughly trashed, poisoned, and profaned. And it is also true that in some sense one can never really become conscious in this life without developing a healthy sense of doubt about even the most hallowed of shibboleths. Still to me there is really something sacred about this one oddly spiritual yet secular holiday of ours: this one day of the year in which we all may truly partake, on which we all, in Lincoln’s ever-majestic words “may gather in our homes to thank Providence for the boons it has granted us in this life.”
And in that spirit, to all our readers, whether Russian or American or "none of the above," I wish a very happy Thanksgiving to you all - whoever and wherever you may be.
Julian Lowenfeld is a New York-based poet and lawyer. He is best known as a translator of Alexander Pushkin's poetry into English, for which he was awarded the prestigious Russian literary prize "Petropol."
