When I was a kid in 1950’s Maryland, Thanksgiving was all about the Pilgrims and the friendly Indians in Massachusetts. Before sitting down to turkey and stuffing at Grandma’s house, I’d probably participated in an earlier school Thanksgiving pageant, its prize roles going to the Indian Squanto and to Massachusetts governor William Bradford. We made paper cutouts of Pilgrim hats, or paper headdresses of fake feathers. It was pretty much the same every year.
Much later, after I’d lived near Virginia’s coastal plains for decades, I went to watch a celebration of the Virginia version of the first Thanksgiving—held, locals bragged, before the Massachusetts pilgrims had even landed. At what later became Berkeley Plantation, according to its website (https://berkeleyplantation.com/first-thanksgiving), in late November, 1619, a newly arrived set of 50 additional Virginia settlers gave thanks, per instructions from their sponsors back in England: “We ordaine that this day of our ships arrival, at the place assigned for plantacon, in the land of Virginia, shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.” Little thought back then was given to the perspectives of the native peoples who were often being displaced, diseased, and/or disrespected by the growing numbers of European settlers coming to Virginia, Massachusetts, and other areas up and down the Eastern seaboard of North America. You have to read beyond the Thanksgiving chapter of the Berkeley website to learn that in 1622, local tribes rose up in a concerted attack against the British settlers, after which the Berkeley settlement disintegrated. The next Thanksgiving celebration at Berkeley was not until 1958.
I now live in California, where origin stories for Thanksgiving are multiple and murky. It’s possible that the earliest Spanish or Russian explorers had celebrations of thanksgiving after surviving especially difficult passages. Later specific dates for California’s initial celebrations are variously given as: December 10, 1774, when some of the Franciscan missionaries in the area celebrated a near-miraculous return to health of one of their brothers; or November 29, 1849 in and around the goldfields; or November 30, 1850, based on a proclamation by Governor Peter Burnett in Sacramento in the newly established State of California. The safest date to recognize may be the 1863 proclamation by Abraham Lincoln of the first national day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November.
Wherever we live in the U.S., there seem to be a wealth of “first Thanksgivings” to choose from. Our views of what’s appropriate for Thanksgiving and “who got there first” will likely continue to change.
The book Factfulness was written by three Swedes, so there are no examples of Thanksgivings and the way the feast has changed. However, the authors use multiple examples to show that many things do change, if sometimes slowly. One example I especially like is Hans Rosling’s analysis of the compounding impact of slow changes for Earth’s nature preserves and natural parks. Under the rubric “Slow Change Is Not No Change,” he begins with an initial set-aside of natural land nearly 2500 years ago:
“In the third century BC, the world’s first nature reserve was created by King Devanampiya Tessa in Sri Lanka. … It took more than 2000 years for a European, in West Yorkshire, to get a similar idea, and another 50 years before Yellowstone National Park was established in the United States. By the year 1900, 0.03 percent of the Earth’s land surface as protected. …Slowly, slowly, decade by decade, one forest at a time, the numbers climbed. The annual increase was absolutely tiny, almost imperceptible. Today a stunning 15 percent of the Earth’s surface is protected, and the number is still climbing.” (One globally ambitions goal is to have 30% of the earth’s land and seas protected by 2030: https://www.campaignfornature.org/getting-to-30.)
Of course, change can be multi-directional. There’s no guarantee all change will be positive. But the notion that things cannot change can prevent much of the experimentation that might help improve things.
Among the prescriptions the Roslings suggest for countering the “destiny instinct” are exercises like the one I’ve tried to develop here about Thanksgiving—the way we now think about and celebrate Thanksgiving is not the same as when I was a child, nor need it be the way people will celebrate in the future. Per the Roslings, “Challenge the idea that today’s culture must also have been yesterday’s, and will also be tomorrow’s.”
In a long life so far, among the things that have not changed for me are gratitude for life. I’m also grateful for new and renewed possibilities for continued learning. Happy Thanksgiving to all!
Jinny's Occasional Poems 