Henrietta Hay's Column

Halloween is over but I'm still eating forbidden candy. It's OK to give the kids sugar and cholesterol, but I always feel guilty when I eat what is left over. Christmas is still a month away but the catalogs are pouring in and the decorations are up in the stores.

I suspect eventually Christmas will work its way forward to the 4th of July. In the meantime we have Thanksgiving, the day of family, food and football. And if we happen to remember, we may pause to say Thank You.

Thanksgiving is tucked in between Halloween and Christmas and it almost gets lost in the shopping frenzy. Maybe we should move it. It is traditional and sort of patriotic and the air is filled with footballs but it really doesn't have a lot of significance. We all have this very clear picture in our minds, planted there when we were in grade school, of the first Thanksgiving. As Cecil Adams puts it in the most irreverent reference source in my private library, The Straight Dope, "What we now think of as the original Thanksgiving took place in the fall of 1621 . . . with the Pilgrims and some 90 Wampanoag Indians on hand to chow down, play volleyball and exchange native diseases." To be a little more accurate, they were presumably eating wild turkey and something or other made of corn and not much else. The women in the paintings we see were in traditional dresses and white aprons and the men wore their best clothes and their funny hats.

But this is probably not quite the way it happened. Just a year before, after sixty-six days at sea the sailing ship Mayflower landed off Cape Cod. On the day after Christmas, 102 passengers disembarked at what is now Plymouth. During that first harsh winter over half the colony died. That first "Thanksgiving" celebrated by the survivors must really have been pretty grim.

What I suspect that should remember, more than the turkey, is the document they formed before they landed. In part the Mayflower Compact reads, " . . . doe by these presents solemnly & mutualy in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant & combine our selves togeather into a civill body politick; . . . and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute and frame shuch just & equall lawes... as shall be thought most meete & convenient for the general good of the Colonie...unto which we promise all due submission and obediance." For that document we all have reasons to be thankful.

Although there were various local celebrations through the years, the idea of holding a national day of thanksgiving did not start in 1621. It was George Washington who first proclaimed one in 1777 to celebrate the defeat of General Burgoyne at Saratoga. It had nothing at all to do with food. My old friend, Thomas Jefferson, did not approve of holidays. He considered them to be a "monarchical practice" and ignored Thanksgiving, much to the disgust of the federal employees of the day.

The Thanksgiving we celebrate today is the result of a long effort by a Mrs. Hale. In 1827 this persistent woman wrote a novel in which an entire chapter concerned her idea of a Thanksgiving feast. For many years she edited Godey's Lady's Book, that nineteenth century authority on female beauty. This was somewhat before my time, but for years in Godey's she ran a campaign of high cholesterol recipes for Thanksgiving dinners, including, "ham soaked in cider three weeks, stuffed with sweet potatoes and baked in maple syrup." Her efforts continued through the Civil War and finally Abraham Lincoln set aside the last Thursday of November as the official day of Thanksgiving. The day has been moved about a bit here and there, but we do still have The Day in November

One tidbit I picked up in reading about this comes out of the World Almanac. "Technically there are no national holidays in the United States; each state has jurisdiction over its holidays. The President and Congress can legally designate holidays only for The District of Columbia and federal employees." We'd best keep our Colorado legislators happy this year, so we will have something to be thankful for next year.

Whether you plan to eat turkey, or ham baked in maple syrup, I hope you enjoy it. As for me, I think I'll start a campaign to get Thanksgiving Day moved to March, when we really need a break in the winter and are not worrying about Christmas shopping.