View from the North 40: Thanksgiving tradition - or not

We serve up the word “traditional” a lot when talking about Thanksgiving dinner, but it’s now clear that our grade school textbooks lied to us about the origins of this holiday. Or maybe you went to a better school than I did.

Smithsonianmag.com writer Megan Gambino tells us that the official, federally recognized holiday of Thanksgiving comes to us thanks to the remarkably persistent efforts of Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of what was in the early to mid-1800s a popular women’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book.

In 1827 Hale petitioned President John Quincy Adams to make Thanksgiving Day an officially recognized holiday. He said, no thanks, and declined the request to create a presidentially sanctioned day off from the work week.

In fact, nine more presidents told her the same thing, despite what Gambino described as a growing nostalgia in the U.S. for those early Pilgrim days, when life was simpler and less fast-paced. By the mid-1800s, innovations like dirt and cobbled roads allowed a horse-drawn carts to rush everywhere, and that cursed telegraph was rumored to be taking over the nation.

But Hale persisted in promoting Thanksgiving recipes in her magazine and petitioning each successive president until the Civil War saved her cause and ended her stalker status. Gambino said that in 1963 Hale pitched Thanksgiving Day as a way to unite a divided country in a way that focused on the positive, and Lincoln said, hey, that’s an awesome idea.

Hale’s triumph, though, was only a partial victory. Lincoln declared two Thanksgiving celebrations that year, Aug. 6 with the victory at Gettysburg and the last Thursday in November. Nevertheless, Lincoln didn’t bother to explain why he thoguht Thursday would be a good day for a major holiday.

He also didn’t didn't bother to make Thanksgiving an official holiday, so each year a president had to declare a Thanksgiving Day.

The website Plimoth.org says that it became the tradition of presidents to make the last Thursday of November the day, until President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to lengthen the Christmas shopping season one week and declared the second to last Thursday to be T-day.

We can blame Black Friday and the extended shopping season on FDR, but we should also take a moment to be thankful he didn’t name the holiday Black Friday Eve and promote it as the kickoff to shopping season.

About 100 years after people started celebrating the holiday on their own, Congress finally relented and made Thanksgiving Day official in 1941, and set on the third Thursday of November, thus upholding both Lincoln’s and FDR’s foolhardiness.

Though Hale’s magazine, the evolution of cooking practices, supermarkets and other influences changed the traditional Thanksgiving dinner menu into what it is today, that original meal had much that was recognizable today.

In fact, the History Channel website, History.com, says that Pilgrim hunting parties brought back many different kinds of birds for that first harvest meal in 1621, and they set the precedence for the Thanksgiving meat-mashup that has evolved into the turducken. But, since the site also says that the Wampanoag Indians brought venison, perhaps it’s more accurate to call the meat entree a turduckeneer.

History.com also says that many recognizable fruits and vegetables, such as blueberries, plums, grapes, gooseberries, raspberries, cranberries, onions, beans, lettuce, spinach, cabbage and carrots were served, as well as corn in the form of a cornmeal mush kind of affair.

The pumpkin pie, however, was probably a custard made using a pumpkin as a sort of roasting vessel.

That fist meal also opened the door to including regional cuisine because it included lobster, shell fish and other region-specific foods.

Though many people do this each year it doesn’t really explain why I caved to an urge to make chili and cornbread with avocado, tomatillo sauce and corn chips as a side, but it makes my break from a “traditional” menu not completely ridiculous after all.

(History.com also says there is no way, no how, that first meal had mashed potatoes, which is a ridiculous notion because everyone knows that a turkey will actually resurrect itself and fly out the window if it’s not served with mashed potatoes. Or maybe that’s just at [email protected].)