Plymouth has long been known as site of 1st observance; but other places say they celebrated the holiday earlier

Thanksgiving Day means banks, post office lobbies and Benicia’s own municipal buildings — including City Hall, Benicia Community Center, the Senior Center and the public library — will be closed.

More and more, retailers that normally were closed for the holiday are starting to open so shoppers can get a jump on their holiday buying sprees.

But the day has its roots in early celebrations of other bounty, as well as the gathering of family members for a good dinner, though in the midst of war one president tried to encourage more shopping by changing the holiday’s date.

Plimoth Plantation Museum, a Smithsonian Institution Affiliates Program, starts its history of the holiday with the Wampanoag people, who participated in thanksgiving ceremonies after successful harvests and who still live in New England.

That nation also celebrated other auspicious events as well as the promise of future success, such as the spring growing season and the birth of a child.

Far away, in England and other European countries, people of those lands had their versions of such celebrations, involving feasts and forms of merrymaking.

The two traditions combined in 1621, when the Pilgrims saw the reward of a bountiful harvest after a year full of sickness and scarcity.

The Wampanoag suffered an epidemic before the arrival of the colonists, and later, merchant ships captured some of them and sold them as slaves in Europe. Among them was a man named Tisquantum, later called Squanto, who was bought by Spanish monks.

After Squanto was set free, he sailed back to the New World on an English vessel, where he served as interpreter to an expedition to Newfoundland. He eventually returned to New England, where he discovered his family had died during the epidemic.

After the arrival of the Plymouth colonists, Squanto and other Wampanoag people showed the Pilgrims how to grow corn, squash and beans, how to catch local fish and collect seafood.

However, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag weren’t identified with the holiday until about 1900, after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” was published in 1848 and Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford’s manuscript, “Of Plimoth Plantation,” was recovered. Those writings sparked interest in the Pilgrims and the Native Americans just as the holiday gained importance.

The Plimoth Plantation’s history tells how Pilgrims gave thanks to God and celebrated in a Harvest Home tradition, with both feasting and sport.

In contrast, the Puritans, who arrived after the Pilgrims, interpreted Thanksgiving as a solemn, religious observance, the history said.

While most retellings of the first European Thanksgiving in the New World usually sets the scene in Plymouth, Mass., that’s not the only place to lay claim to the first celebration, the history relates.
Florida, Texas, Maine and Virginia have declared themselves as the places where the first Thanksgiving took place.

And they have historical documents to support those claims, because other explorers and colonists had services of thanksgiving years before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.

One difference, the history notes, is that few people knew about the other events until the 20th century.

“They were isolated celebrations, forgotten long before the establishment of the American holiday,” the history states. “They played no role in the evolution of Thanksgiving.”

In his book, “The Biography of an American Holiday,” author James W. Baker declares the three-day event in Plymouth during the fall of 1621 as “the historical birth of the American Thanksgiving holiday.”

One of the first accounts of that event was published in 1622 — without the author’s approval, by the way.

Edward Winslow wrote a friend in England, describing the successful harvest and how the governor had sent four men hunting for birds “so we might after a special manner rejoice together.”

The men brought enough birds back to feed “the company almost a week.”

Joining them was a group of 90 Native Americans, “among the rest their greatest king Massasoit.” The two peoples “entertained and feasted” for three days, during which the Native Americans killed five deer and brought them to the plantation’s governor and other officials.

Winslow also mentioned fish, particularly cod and bass, as well as fowl, including wild turkeys, venison and Indian corn.

The pamphlet, called “Mourt’s Relation,” was lost during the Colonial era, then found in Philadelphia, Pa., about 1820. Alexander Young reprinted the text in 1841 in his “Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers,” and the description of the feast later was described as the first Thanksgiving.

For the Puritans, Thanksgiving was considered a holy day; the faith sometimes was inspired by such events as an end to war or drought as a “thanksgiving day,” to be marked with prayer. These weren’t annual events, though Thanksgiving was established simultaneously in Plymouth, Connecticut and elsewhere in Massachusetts.

It was celebrated regularly by the mid-17th century, but it was proclaimed each fall by individual colonies rather than by a single entity.

That didn’t happen until 1777, when the Continental Congress proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving.

During that time, family gatherings superseded worship as the highlight of Thanksgiving, though some still considered it a solemn event.

As the country spread west, so did the holiday.

President George Washington was the first president to proclaim Thanksgiving, but by 1815 that no longer was the custom. Instead, it was up to individual states to decide whether to announce the holiday.

And they did. By the 1850s, nearly every state and territory was celebrating Thanksgiving.

Some expressed the thought that this should again be a national holiday. Sara Josepha Hale, editor of the popular woman’s magazine “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” started a campaign in 1827 to champion that cause.

She petitioned president after president, and finally, in 1863, she convinced President Abraham Lincoln that Thanksgiving might unite a country split by war.

Lincoln responded by declaring two Thanksgivings, one Aug. 6 because of the victory at Gettysburg, and a second on the last Thursday in November.

For years, the sitting president had to proclaim Thanksgiving every year, but the last Thursday in November remained the customary date.

Then Franklin Delano Roosevelt decided to move the date, for purely commercial reasons.

The president wanted to lengthen the 1939 Christmas shopping season by declaring Thanksgiving on the next-to-last Thursday in November.

Congress responded two years later by establishing the holiday permanently as the fourth Thursday of that month.

The traditional Thanksgiving meal of turkey, cranberries, pumpkin pie and vegetables recalls New England fall harvests.

But the menu has been modified based on local produce and regional preferences — for instance, crab has become a Thanksgiving addition in some seaside communities.

Southern cooking, with corn, sweet potatoes and pork, also has been introduced onto to the menu as people from that region of the country moved to other areas.