and then went on to tell them to enjoy themselves in the evening: “After the public worship shall be performed,” citizens were called upon “to indulge in all moderate festivities and rejoicings as the event recommends and their situation shall permit.”12
At some point in the 1600s, the New England colonies began to designate annual thanksgiving days, usually in the autumn, around the time of the harvest. These celebrations were deemed “general” thanksgivings—not for a specific event or blessing, but for continuing blessings. They were usually called by civil rather than religious authorities. These were steps toward the holiday we know today.
Connecticut was the first to make Thanksgiving an annual event. In 1639, the colony proclaimed the first in a series of thanksgivings for ordinary blessings. According to the Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, on August 26, 1639, the General Court of Connecticut “concluded that there be a public day of thanksgiving in these plantations upon the 18th of next month.”13
The custom of a thanksgiving for general blessings did not catch on in Massachusetts until later in the seventeenth century, and then only after a spirited theological debate. The losing side argued that an annual thanksgiving for general reasons would make people take God’s generosity for granted. In the words of one opponent, an annual thanksgiving would “tend to harden the people in their carnal confidence.”14
Under New England law, days of thanksgiving were treated like the Sabbath—as days of rest. Work and entertainments were banned. Violators faced fines and other punishments.
In 1696, an unlucky man by the name of William Veazie, a church warden in Houghs Neck, Massachusetts—now part of the city of Quincy, near Boston—was charged with failing to properly observe a day of public thanksgiving. According to court records, on the morning of that day, Veazie was seen at his farm plowing a field of corn “with an Indian Boy and Two Horses.” He pleaded guilty and was fined ten pounds.
That wasn’t all. The court further sentenced Veazie to “be set in the pillory in the market place in Boston tomorrow about noon, there to stand by the Space of An Hour.” Pillorying an offender in the heart of the city at the busiest time of day sent a potent message to all who passed: Respect Thanksgiving Day.15
Statutes regulating Thanksgiving Day behavior were still in force in New England in the nineteenth century, though the pillory’s days were past. In 1825, a Connecticut man named Gladwin contested the service of a civil process on Thanksgiving Day. He argued that the constable’s delivery of the writ was invalid since there was a law against working on Thanksgiving. The state supreme court agreed. In support of its ruling, the court cited the state statute pertaining to days of thanksgiving: “All persons shall abstain from every kind of servile labour and vain recreation, works of necessity and mercy excepted.” The service of a civil process, the court ruled, was neither a work of necessity nor an act of mercy. Gladwin won his case.16
It is impossible to know precisely when the feasting and family aspects of Thanksgiving Day began to overtake the religious ones, but the trend appears to have started toward the end of the seventeenth century. That is when Thanksgiving dinner grew in importance in New England, “adding homecoming relatives, extra pies and platters of roast meat,” in the words of the historian Diana Karter Appelbaum. Churches accommodated the custom of a festive dinner by eliminating the afternoon service on Thanksgiving Day, “first in the country districts where the walk to meeting was long and cold,” Appelbaum writes, “then in 1720 in Boston itself.” Soon Thanksgiving dinner was nearly as important as the morning prayer service.17
Thanksgiving wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without someone lamenting this trend and calling on Americans to focus their attention less on feasting and more on giving thanks. In 1792, the Connecticut Courant published a letter from a man complaining that Thanksgiving had become a day devoted to eating and drinking.18 In 1873, an article published in the Boston Daily Globe on the day after Thanksgiving bemoaned the decline in the religious character of the day: “The views of our Puritan ancestors in regard to attendance on divine worship were disregarded . . . but the revered turkey was trotted out with all the alacrity which good housewives are wont to expect.”19 In 1926, an editorial in an educational journal complained that “The religious significance of the day touches many not at all, the historical significance is quite forgotten. . . . Are we so self-sufficient that gratitude and acknowledgement are inappropriate?”20
Still, the religious aspects of the holiday continue to touch many Americans today. Chances are good that before you begin your Thanksgiving dinner, you pause for a moment or more to give thanks. For many Americans, perhaps most, giving thanks means saying a prayer. On an ordinary day, 44 percent of Americans say grace before eating, according to one survey. Another 44 percent of Americans report they almost never say grace—a response that implies they do so on special occasions such as Thanksgiving Day.21 Almost every religion practiced in the United States encourages the celebration of Thanksgiving. One exception is Jehovah’s Witnesses, who do not celebrate any holiday that is not based on the Bible.
Americans are a religious people—a strong majority profess a belief in God—and on Thanksgiving Day, they usually express their gratitude to the Almighty in whatever form that being takes shape in their faith. While the custom of attending religious services on Thanksgiving Day has long since lapsed, and the holiday is not tied to any particular religion, for many Americans the opening words of the old Thanksgiving hymn still apply: “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessings.”
Nonreligious Americans find secular ways to express gratitude. Some families go around the Thanksgiving table asking each person, young and old, to name something for which he or she is grateful. Others pause to express gratitude to the cooks who made the meal, the farmers who grew the food, the love of family and friends, the blessings of liberty, or simply for their general good fortune. For the late author Ayn Rand, an atheist, the essential meaning of Thanksgiving was “a celebration of successful production.” The lavish meal, she wrote, is “a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America’s pride—just as it is the pride of American parents that their children need never know starvation.”22
In his lovely little book The Thanksgiving Ceremony, published in 2003, Edward Bleier, a Jew and the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, describes a ritual he composed for use around the Thanksgiving table.23 Bleier’s twenty-minute ceremony acknowledges God but is nonsectarian. The ceremony is inspired by the Passover Seder, which celebrates the Jews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt as told in the biblical book of Exodus. The Thanksgiving Ceremony recounts the Pilgrim story, and includes brief readings from the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, a speech by Martin Luther King, and other notable American texts. It concludes with the singing of “America the Beautiful.”
Bleier’s Thanksgiving ceremony reflects another aspect of Thanksgiving Day gratitude that has become part of the holiday: love of country. Since the Revolution, Thanksgiving has become a patriotic holiday, a time to give thanks for the blessings of liberty as enshrined in the American system of government. Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations end with the date expressed in both the ordinary way and as “year X of the Independence of the United States.”
Nearly four hundred years after the First Thanksgiving, gratitude is still the byword of the day. On the fourth Thursday of November, most Americans, believers and nonbelievers, take seriously the custom of pausing to give thanks. This is the essential meaning of the Thanksgiving holiday. It was also the meaning of the days of thanksgiving marked by the Europeans who preceded
