How Thanksgiving Conquered America

For longer than most of us can remember, the classic American Thanksgiving has combined three essential activities: watching the Macy’s parade in the morning, watching football in the afternoon, and eating turkey in the evening. Followed the next day by a trip to the mall to get a jump on Christmas shopping. Thanksgiving has come—or gone—a long way since whatever happened with the Pilgrims at the holiday’s traditional first appearance, at Plymouth Colony in 1621.

Thanksgiving’s origins actually predate the Pilgrims. In Europe, farmers traditionally observed days of thanks in the fall to celebrate the harvest. The colonists brought that custom to America, and a small group of settlers at Berkeley Plantation, in Virginia, held their first day of thanks in December 1619, albeit minus the feasting. President George Washington declared the new nation’s first Thanksgiving on November 26, 1789, but the occasion was not an official federal holiday and remained a regional celebration. In the words of the historian (and Illinois native) Michael Beschloss, it was “thought of as sort of a Yankee holiday”—Yankee meaning not of the North in general but of New England. In an era when states, not the federal government, made holidays official, only a few so designated Thanksgiving. Virginia became the first Southern state to do so in 1855.

President Abraham Lincoln gave the celebration greater prominence during the Civil War when he proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving to be held in November 1863. Sarah Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, had been urging him to do this for some time. The historian Rick Kennedy explains that Hale “saw this as a time for uniting the country in this time of sectional crisis, and the pilgrims and Indians offered her a model. She just took the New England holiday and wanted to make it national.” Lincoln described the celebration in religious terms; his proclamation called it a day “of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” It was still not a federal holiday, but subsequent Presidents annually proclaimed Thanksgivings on the final Thursday in November.

In the half-century following the Civil War, as America’s tremendous economic expansion produced a new consumer culture, much of life became more commercialized and secular, and Thanksgiving was no exception. Macy’s held its first Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City in 1924, with floats and bands. It quickly became an annual event, but not everyone approved. Even one Macy’s employee described his store’s great annual moment as “an offense against a national and essentially religious holiday.”

But that was how the tide was running. Christmas itself was becoming less religious, and Thanksgiving soon became the unofficial start of the Christmas shopping season (now the Friday after is the busiest shopping day of the year). In 1939 President Franklin Roosevelt, in an attempt to help business by extending the shopping season, proclaimed that Thanksgiving would be on the next to last Thursday of November instead of the final one. Two years later Congress finally settled the matter, making it an official federal holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November.

Professional football was the last element of contemporary Thanksgiving to emerge. Games began to be held on the holiday in the 1930s, but the National Football League was a relatively minor part of the entertainment landscape until the early 1960s. By the mid-1970s, however, TV, combined with savvy marketing by Commissioner Pete Rozelle, had made it the most lucrative professional sport in America. The league always scheduled two nationally televised games on Thanksgiving, usually featuring both the Dallas Cowboys, one of the most successful and popular franchises in the sport, and the Detroit Lions, one of the least successful. These games have provided many thrilling moments, most notably backup Cowboys quarterback Clint Longley’s last-second touchdown pass to Drew Pearson in 1974, which propelled Dallas to a victory over their archrivals the Washington Redskins.

So even if you just sit immobile in front of the TV today, you’re taking an active part in a truly American tradition.