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The First Thanksgiving?
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This painting of “The First Thanksgiving” by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863–1930) helped promote the myths associated with the American celebration. |
When was the first thanksgiving? — It’s a question that is impossible to answer. The custom of thanking the gods for a bountiful harvest is a very old one. It was practiced by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and many other cultures throughout history. The German Erntedankfest comes out of that agricultural tradition. To some extent, so does the American Thanksgiving holiday (but not the Canadian one).
One thing is certain: even if you limit the search to North America, the first thanksgiving was definitely not the well-known 1621 harvest celebration of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians in New England! Beyond the many myths associated with that particular event, there are several other strong claims to the first North American thanksgiving celebration:
- 1513: The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León was grateful for his safe landing in Florida around Easter.
- 1541: Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s May 23rd service of thanksgiving (after finding food) at Palo Duro Canyon in Texas near present-day Amarillo.
- 1576: Canadians claim that Martin Frobisher’s thanksgiving on Baffin Island was the first.
- 1607/1610: There were two different thanksgiving observances in Jamestown, Virginia, over a decade before the Pilgrims in New England.
Of course, Native Americans, who were very much involved in the 17th century New England events, have their own unique perspective on all of this. The “Indians” of North and South America have a long tradition of harvest and hunting thanksgiving. They also contributed many of the food items that we now associate with Thanksgiving: beans (Bohnen), corn (Mais), squash (Zucchini), sweet potatoes (Batate), potatoes (Kartoffeln, not available to the Pilgrims in 1621), cranberries, and turkey (Puter, roasted but not stuffed in 1621).
The American celebration itself is a historically recent development, in fact connected only tenuously to any of the so-called “first” thanksgivings. The American thanksgiving of 1621 was all but forgotten until the 19th century. The 1621 event was not repeated, and what many consider the first authentic Calvinist, religious thanksgiving did not take place until 1623 in Plymouth Colony.
After that, Thanksgiving was celebrated only occasionally in some regions, and has only been a US national holiday since the 1940s. The very first official American Thanksgiving Day was proclaimed by the Continental Congress for Thursday, December 18, 1777. In 1789 George Washington proclaimed a one-time-only day of thanksgiving for Thursday, November 26, to celebrate the new Constitution. For many decades after that, there were no thanksgiving holidays at all in the US.
Many historians credit Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the first women’s magazines, as the person responsible for creating the American thanksgiving holiday as we know it today, complete with stuffed turkey and pumpkin pie. For three decades she campaigned stubbornly for the holiday — until President Lincoln declared a national Day of Thanksgiving in 1863, to be observed on the last Thursday in November. But it was a one-time event. Future Thanksgiving observances were based on the whims of various presidents until 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill creating the current holiday on the fourth Thursday in November.
Canadians began their second-Monday-in-October Thanksgiving observance in 1957, although the official holiday actually goes back to 1879, making it a much older national observance than the US holiday. Canada’s Dankfest was celebrated annually on November 6th until it was moved to Monday, giving Canadians a long weekend. Canadians (Kanadier) adamently deny any connection between their Thanksgiving and the American Pilgrim tradition. They claim the English explorer Martin Frobisher and his 1576 Thanksgiving on what is now Baffin Island — which they assert was the “real” first Thanksgiving in North America, beating the Pilgrims by 45 years (but not the Florida or Texas thanksgivings).
As we mentioned in Part 1, the Germanic Erntedankfest is celebrated locally and regionally at various times. None of the German-speaking countries observes an official national Thanksgiving holiday on a particular day, as in Canada or the US.
You can see how different the German and Austrian thanksgiving celebrations are from the North American ones by viewing the Erntedank videos on the next page.
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Related Pages
- English-German Thanksgiving - Erntedank Glossary at AboutGerman.net
- German Celebrations & Holidays - A calendar
- Cultural Comparison Charts comparing various cultural differences between the USA and Germany
- Halloween and Martinstag - More German fall celebrations.
- Christmas in Germany - The first part of our German Christmas pages
- Christmas in the USA and Germany - A comparison chart
- Barbarazweig - The legend and the Christmas custom.
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