Thanksgiving: Beyond the Turkey

A brief history

Thanksgiving - better known now as Black Friday Eve.

Turkey, stuffing, wine and pie.  A day where we can enjoy the deep, rich spoils of lower middle class.  A day ripe in history set aside to give thanks for all that is around us.   But where exactly does this magical holiday come from?

Genocide, disease and deception of course!

Most of us learned Thanksgiving started in 1621 when the Pilgrims sat down with their new friends - the "Indians" (the erroneous name given to an entire continent of indigenous people by one of history's biggest douche-canoes : Christopher Columbus.  That mass murdering, human trafficking, sociopath thought he was in a completely different place - the Indies - when he named them) and a grand peaceful feast ensued highlighting how two different people can come together and live in peace.  

Not exactly.

In 1621 there was a harvest festival (the word “Thanksgiving” was never used or mentioned)  at Plymouth Plantation that featured the presence of a handful of Native Americans from the Wampanoag and Abenaki tribes.  Squanto was also there. You know - Squanto.  The displaced former slave who was tortured for 8 years then forced to become an English language translator living with an alternate Native American tribe, the Wampanoags,  because his tribe, the Patuxet,  had been destroyed by the uncontrolled spread of smallpox, measles, influenza, tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhus, cholera and a litany of other diseases the Pilgrims and Puritans had introduced to North America.

That and murder - lots of murder. 

Anyway, this 3-day festival is often seen as more of a religiously mandated event than a freely created impromptu celebration of thankfulness and togetherness.  Either way this was one of the first and very few harvest celebrations for the next 16 years when they became more recurring. 

To be fair in 1623 there was the first Thanksgiving Day parade of sorts thrown by the crazy, homicidal maniac Myles Standish who, through the guise of a peaceful dinner, ambushed then cut the head off of a tribal chief and triumphantly trotted it through downtown Plymouth Plantation…along with a flag made of cloth soaked in the chief’s own blood.  

Pass the rolls please.  

In 1637 to celebrate the safe return of a small heavily armed and deranged force of Puritans to Massachusetts Bay, Governor John Winthrop declared it a "day of Thanksgiving".  That small heavily armed force of Puritans had just returned from what is now Stonington, Connecticut where they massacred over 700 Pequot Native Americans - the men were shot, stabbed and attacked with dogs and the woman and children were burned alive!  The survivors of the massacre were forcefully drowned in swamps, flayed alive, or sold into slavery!  This was the first of countless massacres after which the Pilgrims/Puritans would observe their "victories" with "Thanksgiving" celebrations.

Fast forward.

As the annual tally of Thanksgiving celebrations (war and harvest festivals) were on the uptick George Washington set out to calm down a population of blood thirsty colonists and established the first quasi- Thanksgiving to go down on November 26th 1789.  The irony in this is that when Georgee-poo (an uppity, law skirting, slave owning, over-hyped egomaniac) decreed the holiday - he capped it at 1 Thanksgiving a year. But Georgee-poo liked to party and issued multiple Thanksgivings in 1795 - mostly after large political victories by his own party.  But it was not an official holiday and not a real tradition.  Not yet.

Like all great holidays, Thanksgiving kind of disappeared - literally.  Staying close to its roots deeply embedded in death and mayhem, it popped up only a few times in the next few decades mainly to celebrate milestones of the War of 1812.   But aside from the glamorization of war and raping of an entire people Thanksgiving, with the exception of a few small, local "thanksgiving" celebrations randomly scattered  throughout the year, was largely discarded on a national scale.

Ohhhhhh but wait.  Here comes Sarah Josepha Hale.

Sarah was a radical - one of those Nineteenth century women who advocated for things like female equality and education but not through the women's suffrage movement.  No - not old Sarah.  Instead she thought it better to manipulate men behind closed doors - through "secret and silent influence".  So...she was a whore with an agenda.   Well Old Sarah and her super-secret-silent influence took up a letter writing campaign in 1827 and hit up virtually every political body in America including 5 consecutive presidents asking them to establish Thanksgiving as a nationally recognized day. They all said no.  Old Sarah had celebrated it as a child and held the idea near and dear to her heart.  She figured the highlighting or war, murder, theft and disease needed to be reestablished and commemorated. So she kept writing letters until finally a president, in desperate need of a national morale boost, wanted to listen...some 35 years later.

In 1863 there was some serious shit going down in America.  The Greenhouse effect was discovered, West Virginia became a thing, the military draft was established, Linoleum was patented.  But there was also a little-tiny-something raging we call "The American Civil War".   And if we know anything about Thanksgiving - it REALLY likes war.  

Enter Abe Lincoln.   

When honest Abe wasn't censoring and shutting down newspapers, suspending habeas corpus, authorizing death marches for Native Americans across current day New Mexico or trying to rid the United States of “free” African Americans through the American Colonization Society, he was presiding over what could amount to be the death of the Union in the form of an intercontinental bloodbath.  

The war was swinging in favor of the Union in 1863 after winning a few small skirmishes at Vicksburg, Port Hudson and Gettysburg but these "victories" were not without the reality that 100,610 total casualties occurred in those battles alone.  Entrenched in war that saw cannonball and musket projectile wounds for over 2 years the morale of the country was not exactly shitting rainbows. (You know who was REALLY not shitting rainbows? The Native Americans. By 1863 they had seen MILLIONS of their people exterminated by the United States government and relocated to federal reservations and in some cases internment camps) But Honest Abe saw an opportunity.  A little misdirection from the literal shit show reality in the form of a war festival.  But this time he wanted to go big...he wanted a national fucking holiday.

Hey if the Romans could instill widespread public ignorance and superficial acceptance of their government with nothing more than bread and circuses – so could the United States.  How history repeats itself...

So on October 3rd, 1863 good old honest Abe proclaimed Thanksgiving as a set, official,  reoccurring national "day of Thanksgiving and Praise" to be observed on the final Thursday of November. He made sure to add a few lines directed at the widows, orphans and mourners of the "lamentable civil strife" in which they were "unavoidably engaged" - a sort of take your minds off this war and celebrate...anything.  Just don’t mention that whole Indian thing because – wow –it’s REALLY bad.

And thus Thanksgiving was born.  Shrouding and celebrating genocide, war, death, disease and deception for 377 years.