November for most people usually means only one thing: Thanksgiving. And what Thanksgiving usually means is getting together with family and eating a lot of delicious foods. But is that all Thanksgiving is anymore? An opportunity for people to get together and eat? Granted, for some people this is usually the only major chance they have to reunite with their loved ones and spend some time together. But increasingly, a lot of people use Thanksgiving as an excuse to indulge and stuff themselves (ironically like they did with the turkey) for no better reason than that it’s a holiday and there’s nothing better to do. And since the romanticized historical connotations of Thanksgiving aren’t all that accurate, seeing as the Native Americans getting together with the Pilgrims might never have happened, there should be a better, more moral reason that we still celebrate this holiday.
The biggest issue for a lot of holidays now, not just Thanksgiving, is commercialization. Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Halloween–more and more the holidays don’t seem to matter so much as the stuff we need for them. Christmas isn’t the spirit of acknowledging what you have and what you give to others; it’s the tree and the stuff under it. Valentine’s Day is no longer about expressing your love for your significant other; the only thing that seems to matter is making sure to buy cards and roses and gifts. The point is, a lot of our holidays no longer seem to care about the human interaction that necessitated these holidays in the first place. And without these intrinsic connections with other people, most of our holidays stop being about people and start being more about things.
Getting back to Thanksgiving, why was Thanksgiving started and how does that relate with how it is celebrated today? If you remember your elementary school classes during this holiday and subsequent American history lessons, Thanksgiving is traditionally remembered as the time when Pilgrims and Native Americans sat down together and shared food. This account is actually sketchy at best, as many Pilgrim communities during the time had their own Thanksgivings. In the traditional Christian sense, ‘thanksgiving’ usually refers to ‘giving thanks to God’ when eating food, and while this may have been the case for some of the Thanksgivings celebrated by Pilgrims, it wasn’t for all of them. One instance, in fact, was seen as an act of relief during a siege. With so many stories of Thanksgiving, it’s hard enough to trace the actual event that sparked it.
Speaking of the religious connotations of Thanksgiving, there were debates concerning the nature of Thanksgiving as a holiday and as a part of religious ceremony. And each state observed Thanksgiving on different dates. It wasn’t until 1863 when Abraham Lincoln officially announced Thanksgiving to be held in November. Interestingly, it was used as a means to foster brotherhood between the North and the South during the Civil War; the holiday didn’t enter into effect nationwide until the war ended, during Reconstruction. Even still, Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the holiday date again, to its current date, in order to boost the economy.
So with a tumultuous history and impossible to trace origins, why do we still celebrate Thanksgiving? The best answer to be given, throughout history, has been to use it as a means to come together and share in community. Whether it is for religious, political, social, or economic reasons, Thanksgiving has always been used to bring people together. It’s not about the food, it’s about the people. So this Thanksgiving, make sure to be more thankful for the people around you more than the food on your plate!
Sources:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/590003/Thanksgiving-Day