Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is an awkward observance for most clergy, or at least those of a liturgical bent. This is because, quite simply, Thanksgiving is not a Church holiday; it is an affair of state. As such, we do not have a ready-made observance, no rubrics to follow. This leads to an improvised hodgepodge of Thanksgiving Day or Thanksgiving Eve services, some certainly better than others, yet all of them blurring the line betwixt the secular and the sacred. Thus we must take care. Render unto Caesar, and all that.

One could approach the story of Thanksgiving from several different angles. School plays often point to the Year of Our Lord 1621, when the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, both Strangers and Saints, shared a three-day harvest festival with their Wampanoag allies. Historians often point to 1863, the height of the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a Federal holiday commemorating the founding unity of the American nation. But an honest account of its origins, methinks, lies somewhere in between.

The Puritans sadly weren’t much for holidays. Halloween, Christmas, even Easter, were not attested in the Scriptures, and so were dismissed as pagan. They weren’t, of course, but that line still gets picked up in American pop-history today. Rather than set solemnities on the calendar, Puritans declared days of fasting or thanksgiving as circumstances and the Holy Spirit dictated. The spontaneity of such events they considered a more authentic expression of Christian faith.

In times of crisis or danger, days of humiliation with fasting appealed to God for His mercies; while thanksgivings were declared in response to providential happenings such as victory in battle or the abatement of pandemic. Puritans treated such thanksgivings, however, much like the sabbath; that is, they spent most of it in their houses of worship, and forbade any labor to be done. Should there be a feast, which was not the norm, all had to have been prepared well in advance.

The famous celebration of 1621 was not, strictly speaking, a day of thanksgiving. And no-one thought to claim it as “the First Thanksgiving” until a reprinting of Mourt’s Relation in 1841 designated it as such in an editor’s footnote. So how, then, did the annual Thanksgiving holiday that we now know evolve in New England between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries? In a word: Christmas.

Recall that the Puritan fathers rejected as pagan the December observation of the Nativity of Our Lord. This surely sours them to the modern reader. After all, what sorts of uptight busybodies would outlaw Christmas? But of course, the Christmas they knew didn’t look like the Yuletide so near and dear to us today. For much of the late medieval and early modern eras, Christmas was a time of raucous carousing, drunkenness, vandalism, violence, and sins of the flesh, a veritable midwinter Mardi Gras.

But over time, the darker side of Christmas gave way to a child-centered domesticity best exemplified by Dicken’s Christmas Carol, Irving’s Old Christmas, and Moore’s Visit From St Nicholas. Christmas calmed down, becoming a tranquil family festival of warmth, joy, games, roaring fires, roast meat, buttered ales and spiced wine (which really was an improvement over more spiritous liquors). And that’s a hard mix to resist.

The Puritans were certainly like us in this way: they didn’t quite know how to pass on the faith that they’d inherited to the grandchildren. Subsequent generations, happily prospering, came to expect not sporadic thanksgivings but regular ones declared at the harvest, a natural annual tradition. Food, family, and friendly frolic came to the fore. In other words, the good old New England Thanksgiving, which we all know and love, and which later became a Federally-mandated observance, began as a way for the progeny of Puritans to celebrate Christmas while still claiming not to celebrate Christmas.

There’s more to the story of course, but I really think that’s the heart of the matter. It’s a pre-Christmas Christmas. And unlike 25 December, the fourth Thursday in November has, with admirable stubbornness, resisted the relentless march of commercialization and commodification that has turned Christmas proper into an absolute orgy of consumption. Thanksgiving, to its credit, is still primarily a holiday of family, food, and thankfulness; even if some of us sneak out early the next morning for Black Friday deals.

So, yes, it makes for a bit of an odd bird, a hybrid of Caesar and saint. But as someone with a Mayflower ancestor and a small gaggle of kids, I find myself appreciating it a little more with every passing year. And not just because my brother-in-law brings a Bloody Mary bar.

In Jesus. Amen.

-Eminent Grand Prelate Sir Knight Ryan Stout