The Mother of Our Thanksgiving Holiday

Sarah Josepha Hale thought about Thanksgiving on a grand scale. 

She had lofty visions. Thanksgiving for most of us is a given, a four-day holiday when we eat turkey and trimmings. Thanksgiving, the origins, the themes and the questions is a much more complicated story and has a larger meaning outside of the dining room table. 

Long before Europeans arrived in America, many native tribes, including the Wampanoag celebrated harvest festivals, the Egyptian held a harvest in honor of Min, their god of vegetation and fertility. 

For the Greeks, Demeter, the goddess of agriculture,  held a harvest feast, the Italians celebrated ‘Cerelia’, in October, after the goddess of grain. 

In the Old Testament, Moses directs the Israelites to celebrate the Fest of the Tabernacles, also called Sukkoth in the Fall. 

“Hooting at hunger" is celebrated by the Ga people from Ghana, the Koreans harvest Festival, Chusok is still in many places.

Sarah Josepha Hale was a very determined woman. The theme of giving thanks, specifically to God, was the purpose of the proclamations of days of thanksgiving by religious and civil authorities. Highlighting the bounty of foods, of course, was the basis for the harvest festivals. (A good harvest meant the difference between life and death)

Hale emphasized the gathering of family & friends. She also put forth the ideas of national unity and charity.  In 1876, the centennial anniversary of the US, she wrote:

“It is a holiday especially worthy of our people.  All its associations and all its influences are of the best kind.  It reunites families and friends.  It awakens kindly & generous sentiments.  It promotes peace and good-will among our mixed population.  It gives a festival for the homes of all, and to the homeless it brings one day in the year of gladness & plenty.  If only charitable feeling which is rouses toward the poor, the suffering, & the helpless, the day has a value beyond all expression”.

Sarah Josepha Hale was born in 1788, in New Hampshire. Her passion for Thanksgiving was influenced by growing up in New England where an annual autumn Thanksgiving Day was already well established. 

Because she was a girl, she did not have opportunities to go to school. Taught by her mother and her brother & later her husband, she excelled in math, French, botany, mineralogy, geology. She became a teacher and writer. She was editor of the American Ladies’ Magazine. Some of Hale’s other accomplishment are:

• She was responsible for Thanksgiving as a national holiday.
• She was the first to advocate women as teachers in public schools.
• She started the first day nursery—boon to working mothers.
• She was the first to suggest public playgrounds….
• She was among the earliest to recognize healthy and sanitation as civic problems & the first to crusade for remedial measures…
• She raised the money to finished Bunker Hill Monument…
• She was the author of some two dozen books & hundreds of poems, including the best knows children’s rhyme…”Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Hale believed that a national Thanksgiving Day had much to offer America, her vision of all Americans “uniting as one Great Family Republic" and would "awaken in American hearts the love of home & country, of thankfulness to God, & peace between brethren."

So on October 3, 1863, President Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Thanksgiving and Congress finally made Thanksgiving Day a legal holiday in 1941.