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Pilgrim Propaganda: The Secret History of Thanksgiving (Part II)

27 Aug, 2014 @ 12:00am - «Ω» .Agean.
…Because it isn’t the first Thanksgiving

The adverse conditions afforded the fundamentalist puritans many opportunities to thank their all-seeing god for their temporal goods and windfalls. Every successful crop, British ship bringing supplies, or good turn must have been reconciled as indicating they walked within divine providence.

“To the Puritans, a true “thanksgiving” was a day of prayer and pious humiliation, thanking God for His special Providence. Auspicious events, such as the sudden ending of war, drought or pestilence, might inspire a thanksgiving proclamation”.

The Anglo-American fundamentalists had many, many days of thanksgiving, and days of religious fasting, a good number of which predated the 1821 celebration. It is important to note that many such previous thanksgivings occurred in Europe making the colonial thanksgiving even less significant. Days of thanks were common in Europe, the base of Western Christendom.

Spanish explorers had three notable days of thanks in the Americas before the pilgrims:

1. On September 8, 1585, explorer Pedro Melendez de Avile celebrated a day of thanksgiving in Florida with group of Spaniards and invited Timucua tribe to join.

2. In 1598, Spanish explorer Juan de Onate and crew held a day of thanksgiving after successfully crossing 350 miles of Mexican badlands.

3. On December 4th, 1619, 38 settlers on the Margaret landed by Jamestown and gave thanks then and every subsequent year until the Indian Massacre of 1622.

“Thanksgiving became a regular event by the middle of the 17th century and it was proclaimed each autumn by the individual Colonies”

How Thanksgiving became a formal holiday

A second thanksgiving was seen in 1823 when a frenzied Plymouth community went on religious fasts to hasten the end of a drought. As the genocide’s days of celebration became too numerous, we eventually crystallized all the historical anguish into one cookie-cutter commercialized holiday. Sarah Josepha Hale, who we would recognize for her work ‘Mary had a little lamb’ and as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, relentlessly campaigned for 20 years for the 1621 Nemasket Raid Pilgrim Thanksgiving to become a holiday, premised on scant passages by William Bradford, Plymouth Governor. There was no universal thanksgivings between all thirteen colonies until October 1777, when the Continental Congress proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving, in part also commemorating the recent wins in General Little Johnny Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga. Washington suggested that a single thanksgiving be celebrated instead of one for each ‘victory’ in 1789, via a ‘thanksgiving proclamation’, proclaiming it to be “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” Presidents Washington, Adams and Monroe proclaimed national Thanksgivings, odd non-annually recurring days of thanks were common. During the Revolution the continental congress officially recognized several days of thanksgiving. Pre-1963 states celebrated thanksgiving whenever convenient, between October and January Abraham Lincoln legitimized Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in September and a national holiday in 1863, amidst the civil war with his own thanksgiving proclamation. “The President declared two national Thanksgivings that year, one for August 6 celebrating the victory at Gettysburg and a second for the last Thursday in November”.

Throughout 1939-1941 Franklin D. Roosevelt, in an attempt to bolster the Christmas shopping season during and after the Great Depression at the behest of U.S. retailers, proclaimed Thanksgiving the third Thursday in November. The new date of congress caused calendar confusion and an issue for school vacations and football games. There was outcry that you couldn’t arbitrarily change a ‘Holiday’, and Atlantic City’s mayor commented that the third Thursday be called “franksgiving”. Congress, in disapproval, passed a joint resolution in 1941 stating that Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of November, as we celebrate it today.

The Evolution of Thanksgiving Rituals

Our modern rituals of thanksgiving bear little to no resemblance to the customs of 1621. The first Pilgrim Thanksgiving was held in the fall of 1621, sometime between September 21 and November 11, and was a three-day feast. They ate fowl and deer for certain and most likely also ate berries, fish, clams, plums, and boiled pumpkin. Mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potato pie, or pumpkin pie aren’t mentioned in the historical record and seem to be popularized by Hale. Lobster, seal and swans were on the Pilgrims’ menu. No desserts were served because sugar rations were very low, and suggestions were made to use native spices in celebratory meals. There was also no milk, cider, potatoes, or butter. There was no domestic cattle for dairy products, and the newly-discovered potato was still considered by many Europeans to be poisonous. The modern notion of thanksgiving foods is due in large part to the infusion of southern staples like ham, sweet potatoes, pies and puddings, and even ambrosia. Our Modern Thanksgiving is one of gridlock, busy airports, food, and consumerism. It is famous for its capitalistic orientation and celebration of uber-materialism, usually referred to as ‘Black Friday’, where people line up and fight over stuff they don’t need with arbitrary reduction in prices.

Do you think our whitewashed history and nationalistic propaganda causes apathetic consumerism?

What else does our fuzzy mythology foment?
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«Ω» .Agean. 27 Aug, 2014 @ 12:01am 
:)
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