11/20/25

Thanksgiving gets short shrift these days.

The Christmas commercialism colossus, burgeoning every year, now occupies a super-sized chunk of November that used to be the province of the Thanksgiving holiday. Christmas backloads ever-farther into autumn, diverting attention from what once was an appropriate pause for gratitude between harvest and the arrival of full-blown winter.

Wife Kathy prefers Thanksgiving to Christmas in several ways. She certainly doesn’t bad-mouth Christmas. But she’s partial to the traditional family Thanksgiving feast: turkey with gravy, dressing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes or mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, rolls, and pumpkin pie (and/or pecan pie and/or apple pie). 

It’s easier to do all that, she says, without the hubbub of get-ready Christmas gift prep, church service, tree decorating, and the ever-present possibility of December snow with its driving hazards for family visitors. We’re always overjoyed when family arrives at any time, but we worry when the Christmas season makes travel difficult for young’uns and their offspring.

She’s always been very fond of Thanksgiving music, like “We Gather Together” and “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come,” both of which she wheedles me into playing on our piano at an appropriate time.

To quote her: “Who doesn’t like a holiday when you get to give thanks for all your blessings, and then eat a lot of all those special foods?”

Indigenous Americans held ceremonies to thank their deities for centuries before Europeans arrived here, of course, with such events documented back to at least the 11th Century. But in the story of European settlement, for many decades several locations have laid claim to the birthplace of the Thanksgiving holiday: Plymouth in Massachusetts in 1621, Berkeley Hundred upstream from Williamsburg on the James River in Virginia in 1619, and St. Augustine in Florida back in 1565. Each has a legitimate claim, but the Plymouth celebration has overwhelmed the other two.

There are several reasons for that. Descendants of New England settlers migrated widely across most of the United States through the years, taking with them the tradition of the Pilgrims’ feast of late 1621. American Presidents developed a practice of declaring a day of thanksgiving on varying dates late in every year.

Then on October 3 during the Civil War in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln, under the persistent goading of popular women’s magazine publisher Sarah Hale, proclaimed the last Thursday of November to be the nation’s annual day to give thanks to God. He mentioned nature’s bounty—and also recent Union victories over Confederate forces. The Massachusetts story, not Virginia’s or Florida’s, was the one he had in mind.

The Plymouth Thanksgiving story gained even more cachet around 1900, as nativist American sentiment grew concerned about the large numbers of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from southern and eastern Europe pouring into the United States. The Pilgrims’ story, giving thanks for guiding them to the New World three centuries earlier, served to contrast “real” Americans with the recent wannabes.

But occasionally November has five Thursdays, not four. During the Depression of the 1930s retailers desperately desired the last November week of those years for more Christmas shopping time (back then nearly all families waited until after Thanksgiving to start their gift buying). So in 1939, under the urging of President Franklin Roosevelt, Congress adopted the fourth Thursday of every November as the official Thanksgiving holiday. It’s remained so ever since.

But today, Thanksgiving has lost its luster as the traditional starting point for Christmas shopping. Consequently it’s also losing its significance in the American holiday pantheon, with retailing as the cause and beneficiary of the trend. For many people that’s not a problem. For some of us older traditionalists, though, it’s a somber change.

Cranberry sauce enthusiasts, unite!