This Exeter Life: Missing

Has anyone seen Thanksgiving?

I could have sworn it used to be right here – two-thirds of the way through November, nestled among the remnants of crunchy leaves and the start of the crisp darkness of winter. Halloween ... Thanksgiving ... Christmas. Yup. I’m positive that’s the way it went.

This year though, Halloween went on too long and Christmas, judging by the number of fully adorned Christmas trees that I’ve already seen, has moved up a month.

The premature blizzard and subsequent power outage postponed trick or treating (don’t even get me started on the ridiculousness of postponing an activity that was meant to be conducted in the DARK) and pushed it into November. Fair enough. This wasn’t really under our control. But Veterans Day, a day that should be about hallowed remembrance, now seems to serve as an interim stepping stone on the ever extending trail of consumption focused holidays. 

For years, Thanksgiving has put up a good fight against the Christmas shopping onslaught, despite Black Friday shopping hours slowly creeping earlier. Six a.m. Five a.m. Midnight on Thanksgiving night. This year, Thanksgiving’s simple focus on family, food and appreciating what we ALREADY has apparently proved no match for the power of the retail industry. In a bold move, Christmas consumerism took a giant leap forward on the calendar this year and joined hands with Veterans Day. The wreaths are out, I heard the Salvation Army bell ringing outside the grocery store last week and Santa was available for photos at the mall this past weekend, even though it wasn’t cold enough to warrant his red suit.

To mark what may very well be the end of Thanksgiving as we have known it, I would like to pay a brief tribute to it here in the form of a history lesson. I hope you’ll bear with me.

We learned in elementary school that the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving in 1621 alongside the Wampanoag tribe, who saved the newcomers from starvation the first year in the “New World.” But did you know that Thanksgiving did not become an official national holiday until 1863?

The notion of a thanksgiving dates back centuries and in many instances referred to a religious exercise often including not a feast, but a fast. After that first Thanksgiving in 1621, the practice took on a rather ad hoc nature throughout the colonies. A day of thanksgiving might be invoked any number of times throughout a year to celebrate a military victory, a good crop or the passage of a state constitution.

The Continental Congress began the practice of encouraging a more collective giving of thanks during the Revolutionary War by proclaiming December 18^th as a Day of Thanksgiving, a tradition George Washington continued after his election as President.

Official proclamations of a national Thanksgiving were spotty from that point forward, often following the whim of the President in office. Adams issued them, Jefferson didn’t. Then Madison revived the practice to celebrate the end of the war of 1812. States got into the game in 1816 when the Governors of New Hampshire and not to be upstaged, Massachusetts, declared November 14^th and 28^th respectively to be a Public Day of Thanksgiving.

This hodgepodge approach continued for nearly half a century, with 25 states and two territories issuing proclamations by 1858.

All the while a woman by the name of Sarah Josepha Hale petitioned every President to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, to no avail. It wasn’t until the Civil War, that Hale captured the attention of the sitting President and had her lifelong dream fulfilled.

Bogged down in a war that was sapping the spirit and strength of the United States, Lincoln saw an opportunity to use the declaration of a National Thanksgiving as a tool for reaffirming the good forture and cohesion of the Union and so declared the last Thursday in November as a National Day of Thanksgiving.

Subsequent President’s followed Lincoln’s lead on timing until the Great Depression. In 1939, President Roosevelt set a precedent that is likely responsible for this year’s disappearance of Thanksgiving all together—he moved the holiday up one week to allow for a longer Christmas shopping season in the hope that it would stimulate the fledgling economy. Hmmm, sound familiar? This declaration again made Thanksgiving a fungible event with some states following Roosevelt’s suggestion and others disregarding it. In 1941, Congress made the date of Thanksgiving a federal law and we have celebrated it on the fourth Thursday of the month ever since.

The taboo against advertising Christmas merchandise before Thanksgiving has clearly gone the way of the Dodo and I, for one, would like it back. The exercise of writing this regular column has largely been an effort to retrain myself to be observant and thankful for what exists around me. In the tradition of centuries of humans who recognized the importance of taking time to give thanks for what has been afforded you, it serves as my own (sort of) weekly thanksgiving and I can only hope it has inspired some of you to do the same.

In the spirit of Occupy Wall Street, how about we start a movement to reestablish Thanksgiving as a meaningful and respected national holiday? I won’t be your leader, I won’t set an agenda and I will provide no direction to the movement other than this:

Something has to change.