A column about history, culture, policy, and things in between.
Thanksgiving has always been my favorite Holiday. There are many reasons for this and I won't bore you with them. But at the risk of saying the obvious, it is time for all of us to, along with the difficulties and challenges we face, take stock of the blessings and good fortune that we have.
The historian in me cannot help but look back, and on this occasion; I do so to the winter of 1620-1621, and the people we know as the Pilgrims. I also look back to the year 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln, just a few months after the bloody crucible of Gettysburg, issued a Proclamation which would install this day as a National Holiday.
From the journals of Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony in 1620 we read:
"Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns to repair unto to seek help; and for the season it was winter, and they that know of the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, and much more to search unknown coasts".
And in 1863, reflecting on two and a half years of horrific Civil War and bloodshed unimaginable, Abraham Lincoln, the most tortured of all our Presidents, penned this closing stanza to his Thanksgiving Proclamation:
"We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel this necessity of reclaiming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens".
It was the Pilgrims whose spirit and conventions established the tradition that would become what we now recognize as Thanksgiving. Two hundred and forty three years later, it was Lincoln who would institutionalize this Holiday, and weave it into the fabric of our national consciousness.
As we reflect on that which merits our thanks and gratitude, let's not forget to count the heritage these people have bequethed to us.
