AFTER THE FIRST harvest of Plymouth colony in 1621, Governor Bradford established a special day of Thanksgiving for prayer and celebration. Other colonies later adopted this feast day. Today it’s a national holiday; a day unique to the American experience and perhaps the richest part of our spiritual heritage. For many Americans it contains more spiritual significance than Christmas–today so sadly debased by the forces of secularism and commerce. We are blessed Thanksgiving’s custom and ceremony has survived.
The first Thanksgiving celebration probably took place in late September or early October. At that time of the year Plymouth harbor held a tremendous number of migrating birds easily felled. According to Nathan Philbrick in his recent book Mayflower, “the First Thanksgiving soon became an overwhelmingly Native celebration when Massasoit and a hundred Pokanokets (more than twice the entire English population of Plymouth) arrived at the settlement with five freshly killed dear.” Though major cultural differences existed between the English Pilgrims and the Native Americans, both peoples understood the need of giving thanks to God. English and Indian were aware of a mystery in creation–within man and in nature.
How many of us have imagined what the First Thanksgiving was like? As a schoolboy drawing cornucopia horns and pilgrim hats I longed to live in those simpler times. And who does not have warm memories regarding family and friends at Thanksgiving season? Yet Thanksgiving properly understood rises above one’s imaginative historical consciousness; the cutout cornucopia horns of school and supermarket and even reminiscences of friends and family, past and present. There has survived even down to our impoverished age a transcendent quality about this day.
Our age, in stark contrast to Pilgrims and Indians, believes that nature and man are mechanical things created by mere chance. We deny the mystery always found in the human being. Few venerate nature, rather we seek dominion over it. Attempts are being made to remake our given human nature into whatever whim we choose. We miss the drama of the human soul. For man is not a machine and understanding him or her begins with a reverence toward this passionate mystery.
Human beings attempt to reach the mystery of things through custom and ceremony. Both are a kind of opening of self to the eternal. At Thanksgiving the custom of thanking the creator corresponds to man’s true nature as a dependent creature. And the other component of the word–giving–liberates men and women from themselves. Our consumer world of getting and having turns us inward sealing us like a tomb.
Poets and faithful priests appreciate mystery along with our need for custom and ceremony. William Butler Yeats put it marvelously in A Prayer For My Daughter:
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
So give thanks for the rich horn of Thanksgiving. It may be too cold to congregate under a spreading laurel tree, but remember that though we live in time, we belong to eternity. And pass the stuffing!
Patrick J. Walsh is a writer living in Quincy, Massachusetts.
