Henrietta Hay's Column

The strains of Christmas music blare at us in the stores, so it must be Thanksgiving. With a whole month to go we all have plenty of time to do all our shopping, mail all our out of town gifts, write all our cards, attend all the social functions and still be cheerful with our families. Well, at least we can be thankful on Thursday that we still have a month.

We all have a very clear picture, painted into our minds by some elementary teacher somewhere about that first Thanksgiving. As Cecil Adams puts it in the most irreverent source in my personal library, The Straight Dope, "What we now think of as the original Thanksgiving too place in the fall of 1621 at the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, with the Pilgrims and some 90 Wampanoag Indians on hand to chow down, play volleyball, and exchange native diseases." The women in the paintings of that traditional celebration wore traditional dresses with clean white aprons and the men wore their best clothes and funny hats.

But this is probably not the way it happened. Just a year before, after 66 days at sea the sailing ship Mayflower landed at what is now Plymouth. On December 16, 1620 102 passengers reached their new home. By spring pneumonia and the privations of a hard winter had cost the lives of over half of the immigrants. The native Indian tribes befriended and helped them, and in October when the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest the Indians were their invited guests. For three days they feasted on turkey and venison, pumpkin and corn. It was the first Thanksgiving.

What we today should remember more than the pretty pictures is the document that 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 cifill 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, despite the fact that those who wrote it slaughtered Indians, kept servants and slaves and treated women no differently from cattle.

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 to do at all 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 distrust of the federal employees of the day.

The Thanksgiving we celebrate today is the result of a long effort by a Mrs. Hale. This persistent woman wrote a novel in which an entire chapter concerned the idea of a Thanksgiving feast. In 1837 she became editor of Godey's Lady's Book, sort of a nineteenth century Ladies Home Journal and soon launched a campaign to make Thanksgiving an official holiday. This was somewhat before my time but for years she ran a campaign of high cholesterol recipes for Thanksgiving for such things as "Indian Pudding with Frumenty sauce" and "ham soaked in cider three weeks stuffed with sweet potatoes and baked in maple syrup."

Finally Abraham Lincoln set aside the last Thursday in November as the official Day of Thanksgiving. The day has been moved around a bit, but we do still have The Day sometime in November.

One tidbit I picked up in reading about this holiday 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 the Colorado Legislature happy this year so we can celebrate being Thankful next year.

Whether you plan to eat turkey, or ham baked in maple syrup, I hope you enjoy it. I expect to so long as I don't have to cook it.