Thanksgiving began as an autumn harvest feast and has been celebrated for hundreds of years. The holiday gives the residents of the United States an opportunity to reunite with family and friends, enjoy a traditional meal, and express gratitude, although in recent years, it is also associated with parades, football, Black Friday shopping, and initiates the holiday season.
If one is curious about the time-honored Thanksgiving traditions or wants to navigate the holiday legally, the following are some of interesting history, laws and legislation surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States.
On October 6, 1941, the House passed a joint resolution declaring the last Thursday in November to be the legal Thanksgiving Day. The Senate, however, amended the resolution establishing the holiday as the fourth Thursday, which would take into account those years when November has five Thursdays.
Throughout U.S. history, Thanksgiving has been held on various days.
In October1621, the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag tribe shared an autumn harvest feast that is acknowledged today as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies. For more than two centuries, days of thanksgiving were celebrated by individual colonies and states. Colonists in New England and Canada regularly observed “thanksgivings,” days of prayer for such blessings as safe journeys, military victories, or abundant harvests. Americans model their holiday on the 1621 harvest feast shared between English colonists and the Wampanoag. This feast lasted three days and was attended by 90 Wampanoag Native American people and 53 Pilgrims (survivors of the Mayflower). On December 11, 1621, Governor Edward Winslow of the Plymouth Colony wrote a letter in hopes of attracting more colonists. In it, he described a three-day feast shared by the Plymouth settlers and the local Wampanoag people.
There are only two surviving documents that reference the original Thanksgiving harvest meal. Curiously, turkey was NOT on the menu for the first Thanksgiving! They describe a feast of freshly killed deer, assorted wildfowl, a bounty of cod and bass, and flint, a native variety of corn harvested by the Native Americans, which was eaten as corn bread and porridge.
Alexander Hamilton once proclaimed: “No citizen of the U.S. shall refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day.” Hamilton’s proclamation became reality, and according to the National Turkey Federation, about 45 million to 46 million turkeys are consumed each Thanksgiving, since it is a bird indigenous and native to North America and thereby set the American table apart, for example, from the British table.
Jefferson signed a proclamation for a day of “Thanksgiving and Prayer,” to be held on December 9, 1779. At that time, the Virginia General Assembly was responsible for formulating state government policies, not the governor. This proclamation did not establish a permanent annual observance.
In 1789, President George Washington issued a proclamation designating November 26 of that year as a national day of thanksgiving to recognize the role of providence in creating the new United States and the new federal Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson refused to endorse the tradition when he declined to make a proclamation in 1801. For Jefferson, supporting the holiday meant supporting state-sponsored religion since Thanksgiving is rooted in Puritan religious traditions.
Later, President James Madison proclaimed two Thanksgivings in 1815, one in the spring and one in the fall.
President Abraham Lincoln started the modern practice of a national Thanksgiving holiday. Amidst a raging Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued a “Proclamation of Thanksgiving” on October 3, 1863, 74 years to the day after President George Washington issued his first presidential Thanksgiving proclamation. The foregoing began in 1846, by the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, Ms. Sarah Josepha Buell Hale who launched a letter-writing campaign to support her cause for a designated day for the Thanksgiving holiday. Finally on September 28, 1863, she wrote directly to President Lincoln, asking him to use his powers to create the holiday. Her 36-year quest was finally fulfilled. Hale was also a New England-born poet, editor, activist, and philanthropist best known for authoring the poem “Mary’s Lamb,” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” as it is known today.
On June 28, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the Holidays Act that made Thanksgiving a yearly appointed federal holiday in Washington D.C. On January 6, 1885, an act by Congress made Thanksgiving, and other federal holidays, a paid holiday for all federal workers throughout the United States.
In both 1939 and 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed Thanksgiving on the third Thursday in November, to lengthen the shopping season for Depression-era retailers to help businesses still suffering from the lingering effects of the Great Depression.
Roosevelt’s proclamation proved controversial, with some states continuing to celebrate on the fourth Thursday of the month. In 1941, Congress put an end to “Franksgiving” by passing a joint resolution that officially established the date of Thanksgiving.
At the end of 1941, Roosevelt signed a bill officially making Thanksgiving Day the fourth Thursday of November, regardless of whether it is the last or the second-to-last Thursday of the month.
It is now a well-established tradition that the President is gifted and later pardons a turkey every Thanksgiving. There are conflicting stories about the origins of the turkey pardon because the tradition of presenting the President with a turkey dates back many decades.
In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln spared a turkey that his son took a liking to, but it was not until 100 years later that President John F. Kennedy spared the first Thanksgiving turkey. The first president to issue a formal pardon to the turkey was George H.W. Bush during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden in 1989.
To detail the turkey pardon history-while the presidential turkey pardon has become a yearly tradition, it is a relatively new tradition. The first turkey spared by a president has been traced to Abraham Lincoln. According to an 1865 dispatch by White House reporter Noah Brooks, Lincoln’s son Tad asked his father to spare the turkey’s life. Tad had adopted the turkey as a pet. Although Lincoln spared this turkey’s life, the turkey was planned for Christmas dinner not Thanksgiving dinner.
Reports of turkeys sent to the White House as gifts at Thanksgiving can be traced back to the 1870’s. Horace Vose, a Rhode Island poultry dealer, began sending turkeys to the White House in the 1870’s until 1913. Vose’s death in 1914 brought about the opportunity for others to send turkeys to the president for Thanksgiving. Official presentations of live turkeys to the president began in 1947 with the National Turkey Federation presenting a live turkey to President Truman. Because of this media notoriety, President Truman is often credited with the first turkey pardon, but he did not pardon the turkey.
In 1963, President Kennedy spared a turkey’s life at the presentation event when he stated, “Let’s keep him going“. In 1973, during the Nixon presidency, the turkey was sent to Oxen Hill Children’s Farm. First Lady Rosalynn Carter (wife of President Jimmy Carter) sent the 1978 turkey to Evans Farm Inn to live in a mini zoo. It became the norm for the turkeys to be sent to farms during the Reagan administration.
The pardoning became formalized and official in 1989, when President George H. W. Bush pardoned that year’s Thanksgiving turkey. “He’s granted a presidential pardon as of right now — and allow him to live out his days on a children’s farm not far from here.” Since 1989, each year, the U.S. President officially pardons a turkey from the Thanksgiving table.
Currently, Thanksgiving has become somewhat controversial. The holiday may be about being thankful in principle, but it is considered by many as an acknowledgment of the role of colonialism in North America and the displacement and oppression of the Native Americans. Indigenous Peoples in America recognize Thanksgiving as a day of mourning. It is a time to remember ancestral history as well as a day to acknowledge and protest the alleged racism and oppression which they claim they continue to experience to date.
As for the two-day holiday-the Friday after Thanksgiving is a state holiday in California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.
The foregoing is just a brief and general legal and historical overview of Thanksgiving.
If you have any additional Questions regarding the foregoing or have any legal issue or concern, please contact the law firm of CASERTA & SPIRITI & in Miami Lakes, Florida.