On Saturday, November 27th, 2010 at four in the afternoon, I podcast a show from a crowded Starbucks in Centerville, Ohio. It included a story about the history of Thanksgiving. I wrote this for the BlogTalkRadio site about the show:
"For the first time, I'm going to try to ad-lib some of this show in addition to reading copy. My subjects will include J.K. Rowling, mentioning her new movie, and the history of Thanksgiving."
Here's my Thanksgiving segment:
"The other morning, I was listening to NPR radio, and there was a link they were talking about. It was called SomethingYouShouldKnow.net. That was their link to the history of Thanksgiving. So I went there, and the first Thanksgiving feast was a harvest meal shared by Plymouth Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indian tribe in 1621. It also says the first national Thanksgiving Day was on November 26th, 1789 by President Washington to give thanks for the establishment of a formal government and for the Constitution. And President Lincoln made Thanksgiving an official national holiday on October 3rd, 1863 in the middle of the Civil War, after a forty year lobbying effort by Sarah Josepha Hale, who was the editor of the Lady's Home Journal. She proposed that turkey, cranberries, and potatoes be a main staple of this festive celebration meal. It was Lincoln's attempt to help heal wounds that were happening at that time in the middle of the Civil War to show the North and the South that we were united, at least by making Thanksgiving a national holiday."
Then I proposed something on this show-"That we start composing, writing, and looking for Thanksgiving music and songs to celebrate this uniquely American holiday. After all, we've got all of December to do this for Christmas. And it just seems silly to just during November when we're having Thanksgiving to be talking about the next month's holiday when we should be talking about this month's holiday. So for October, we should have music for Halloween. In November, we should have music for Thanksgiving. In December, we should have music for Christmas. And so, I'm hoping that some people out there will take the opportunity to write some music, some songs on this. You might even have a hit record for you and make some money. This is a dire national need. We need to have this. We should be playing this music in November, and to celebrate and be thankful for the freedoms we enjoy, our American heritage, and our American stories as well."
Then I recommended a book I checked out of the local public library. "It's called 'Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, An American History', copyright 1984 by Diana Karter Applebaum, and says on the jacket it's 'a thorough and entertaining chronicle of America's oldest and most beloved holiday from it's earliest roots to the present day.' Okay, let's talk about the first Thanksgiving. Well, the first Thanksgiving was actually celebrated in different ways, in different places, and on different dates. In Plymouth in 1621. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony by the Puritans in 1631. In Florida by the French Huguenots in 1564. In Maine by the colonists in 1607. In Virginia by the English colonists in 1619. And the first Spanish-American Thanksgiving was in Texas in 1541. And these weren't November either! These were in August, May, December, June, February, all over the calendar!
"But (it's) with the towns of the Connecticut River and the farm villages of Plymouth Colony that our modern Thanksgiving actually evolved, including the traditions of both the New World and the Old World. And its growth involved both religious and political currents of our American history through different times as well as its culinary history. All this is covered in this book."
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