What Hale described in her first novel—joining voices with others to give thanks—was not completely without precedent, even if it was not a federally mandated practice. And this sort of tradition long predated any transatlantic crossings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Even more universal was something so timeless that it seemed without origin at all: the concept of gratitude, and coming together to express it as a community.
Grazie.
Merci.
Asante.
Gracias.
Shukran.
Danke.
Arigato.
Wado.
Thank you.
These two words—if referring to the English language, of course—can wield a tremendous amount of power, whether spoken aloud or merely murmured quietly in our own cluttered headspace. When stated, the phrase may often be uttered in appreciation for assistance, caring, or consideration received during hardship. From the act of showing up emotionally for a friend after a loss to the providing of shelter or food to someone with less, and everything in between, giving thanks reminds humans to look at what one has, as opposed to what one lacks. This can not only bring peace of mind but can also bring people together. The merest sliver of light and hope stands out so much more starkly amid a deluge of gray and suffering. “Let’s focus on that bright spot over there,” we tell ourselves, “at least for a little while.”
Giving thanks can be a perpetual state of mind, a daily practice, or simply an action done on a particular occasion. It is one that has, over thousands of years, made its way into celebrations and sayings, buttressing prayers and proverbs.
“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has,” believed Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus. And as an old Buddhist proverb states: “‘Enough’ is a feast.”
The value of thanks was no more true in times of antiquity than in any modern-day adaptation of thanksgivings. Hardship and trials, lack and wanting, were inevitably punctuated by merciful moments of relief. Humans learned to—felt compelled to—take time to express thanks for those very moments. These offerings of thanks took many forms and have long been expressed as festivals, rituals, and celebrations, either secular or religious, and often in a melding of these incarnations. The concept of gratitude and thanks is one that permeates cultures, that appears in the nooks and crannies of the planet, and that did so long before our modern languages had the symbols and alphabets to convey that feeling to others.
Let us return again to Rome. Humans here long have given thanks for food harvested, battles won, hardships endured, enemies vanquished. Famed Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero rather notably—and perhaps narcissistically—wrote of his own supplicatio, or “thanksgiving,” which the people of Rome offered to the gods in honor of Cicero’s role in exposing a dangerous plot against the Roman Empire.
“And a thanksgiving to the immortal gods for their singular favor has even been decreed in my name,” Cicero wrote, “which I have been the first civilian to obtain since the foundation of this city, and has been decreed in these words: because I had freed the city from fires, citizens from slaughter, Italy from war.”
Cicero may or may not have been entirely accurate in his claim that he broke the laudatory mold when it came to civilian thanksgivings and his heroic supplicatio. But few would have argued with him. What is notable was each was “a” thanksgiving. Singular. A onetime affair. This kind of celebration stood in some contrast to one of the repeatedly observed festivals in Rome, the Cerealia, honoring the goddess of grain and agriculture, Ceres. According to Roman mythology, when Pluto, god of the Underworld, abducted Ceres’s daughter, Proserpina, Ceres wreaked havoc on the earth, leaving it barren. After some negotiations between Jupiter and the Fates, an agreement was struck: Proserpina would spend part of the year with Pluto—resulting in cold, barren winter—and the summer with Ceres, resulting in fruitful crops and bountiful harvests. During the festival, white-clad women brandishing torches ran about to represent Ceres’s search for her daughter. But in either case, whether for a singular glory of the republic or for the seasonal worship of a goddess, these kinds of thanksgivings were a part of the Roman culture. And Cicero’s own thoughts on the concept of gratitude were also well documented.
“There is nothing which I can esteem more highly than the being and appearing grateful,” he reportedly said, “for this one virtue is not only the greatest, but is also the parent of all other virtues.”
The Romans may have shared numerous ancient thanksgivings and festivals, but then of course so did the Egyptians and the Greeks and many other cultures. There is the Thesmophoria in Greece, which is named in honor of the goddess Demeter (who was also referred to as “Thesmophoros”). The Greek counterpart of Ceres, Demeter had denied the world food in winter as punishment for the god Hades’s abduction of her daughter, Persephone. And when Persephone finally returned, so did agriculture, food, abundance—spring. And so there was a festival of thanks. The Mesopotamian festival of Akitu was celebrated by the ancient Babylonians. The Chinese had Chung Ch’ui, and the Hindus held the festival of Pongol. There are examples from all continents, from the Homowo harvest festival celebrated by the Ga-Adangbe people of Ghana to the Celtic festivities surrounding Lughnasa. Most were centered on thanks for the coming harvest and for food, and, in the case of Lughnasa, a coming together, or assembly.
What were observations of thanks and gratitude in concept then became increasingly evidenced in written history. The religious texts of the monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—provide numerous written references to gratitude and thanks. In the Quran’s longest book, the Surah Al-Baqarah, we can read, “O ye who believe! Eat of the good things that We have provided for you, and be grateful to Allah, if it is Him ye worship.”
Offering prayer in the Jewish faith can fall into three main categories: praise, petition, and lastly—but not leastly—gratitude, or Hoda’ah. Mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, is thanksgiving. As taken from the book of Leviticus: “With the sacrifice of his peace offerings for thanksgiving, he shall present his offering with cakes of leavened bread.” Or look to Nehemiah in chapter 12, where we find “And in the dedication of the wall of Jerusalem, they sought the Levites from all their places to bring them to Jerusalem to perform the dedication with joy, and with thanksgivings, and with song, cymbals, psalteries, and with harps.”
In Christianity, gratitude and thanksgiving are frequently communicated ideas. The English word gratitude has its roots in Medieval Latin. And we are now able to research increasingly early writings for hints about the term thanksgiving, including by examining those inscribed in the Codex Sinaiticus—or Sinai Book—which is considered to be the oldest, most complete version of the Christian Bible known today. This codex is considered even more complete than the Codex Vaticanus, the centuries-old segment of the Bible that resides at the Vatican in Rome. The Codex Sinaiticus encompasses the Septuagint, or Old Testament, dating back to the Greek Christians, as well as the New Testament. The religious writings were initially committed by hand on vellum; it is estimated that the texts of the Codex Sinaiticus date to sometime in the middle of the fourth century. This makes this version of the Christian Bible more than sixteen hundred years old. Older selected texts that have been found contain only parts of the Bible.
One of the more compelling aspects of the Codex Sinaiticus is that not only does it contain handwritten text, but it also offers corrections and edits to prior versions of the very same text. Throughout those edits and changes and tweaks—as one would expect even from any modern-day manuscript—are many passages that emerged from the editing process virtually unscathed. There are nine mentions in the original Codex Sinaiticus of words that translate to English as “thanksgiving,” and those mentions have survived the many subsequent editions of the Bible. From Timothy to Colossians, from Corinthians to Philippians, we have a written record of “thanksgiving” from more than sixteen hundred years ago. For example, from 1 Timothy 2:1, we have the words of the first-century evangelist and disciple Paul the apostle: “I exhort therefore, first of all, that supplications, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings, be made for all men.” Also in 1 Timothy 4:4, we read, “For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be thrown away, being received with thanksgiving . . .”
These appearances of the word are, of course, based on translations. In the development of the English language, a word that would eventually come to conjure images of turkeys and stuffing recipe battles and parades and floats and football games has itself been around for centuries—again, with a variety of meanings and interpretations depending on the occasion.
William Tyndale’s 1526 English translation of the New Testament contained thanksgiving, along with some phrases that have long endured: “eat, drink and be merry” and “salt of the earth.” The word thankesgevynge is seen in the Book of Common Prayer, the guide for worship for the Anglican Church, which dates to 1549, as well as in the King James Version of the Bible—the most printed book in history—dating to 1611. Thanksgiving practice was familiar in England. In 1588, for example, after England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, Queen Elizabeth I declared a day of thanksgiving, and a special service was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Many religious thanksgiving services were often associated with not only prayer but—in irony of all digestible ironies—fasting.
The thanksgiving traditions that were found throughout Europe, including those practiced in England and Holland, would eventually travel when populations from those lands crossed the Atlantic and settled into what is now the eastern coast of the United States. What they brought to this continent was nothing new in spirit, but it came packed within their own languages and traditions. More important, those Indigenous peoples the newcomers encountered upon arriving, people who had already been living on the continent for many years, had their own long-standing traditions of giving thanks.
And so varying expressions of thanksgiving occurred with successive waves of arriving Europeans.
When Francisco Vázquez de Coronado left what would one day be called Mexico City and headed north to look for gold, one of his expedition’s stops was at Palo Duro Canyon, in what is now known as the Texas Panhandle. In that May of 1541, while enjoying their rest and feeling thankful for their thus-far-successful journey, Coronado proclaimed there should be a celebration. He and his crew of some fifteen hundred fellow travelers reveled in gratitude, eating what food they could gather. Fray Juan de Padilla celebrated a Mass.
A little more than twenty years after that event, in June 1564, the thankful celebrants were not Spanish but rather the French Huguenots, who established Fort Caroline in Florida, along the St. Johns River, near present-day Jacksonville. The settlement gave thanks in a more solemn manner for their survival thus far, a survival that was short-lived: That settlement was gone within a year. King Philip II of Spain, believing the land to rightfully belong under Spanish control, dispatched a fleet, and soon the Huguenots of Fort Caroline were massacred, losing both land and life to the Spaniards.
The following year, on September 8, 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine. Menéndez, upon guiding five ships and some eight hundred Spanish settlers ashore to what was then called Spanish La Florida, joined with his fellow travelers in a thanksgiving Mass, followed by a meal to which Menéndez reportedly invited members of the nearby Timucua tribe. The gathering likely dined on salted pork, garbanzo beans, maybe some hard biscuits and red wine—perhaps even a sampling of gopher tortoise.
Farther north on the continent, in what is modern-day Canada, there was a celebration in November 1606. That feast was a meal between the Indigenous peoples and the newly arrived Europeans—namely Frenchman Samuel de Champlain—in the area known as Port Royal. Eating abundantly and safely was key to survival, and the Mi’kmaq had done more than their part in showing the settlers how to ice fish, as well as which berries just happened to be high in vitamin C. That November 1606 fete reportedly featured a performance of Théâtre de Neptune, a play by Frenchman Marc Lescarbot featuring the god Neptune as a main character. It is believed by many to be the first European play performed in North America. Perhaps part “thanksgiving,” part dinner theater.
The following year, in 1607 (the same year the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, took root), the settlement of Fort St. George along the Kennebec River in what is now the state of Maine was the site of both a harvest feast and a prayer meeting between the Abenaki and English settlers. That short-lived fort and its inhabitants were gone just a year later, and thus known as the lost colony of Popham. Farther south, in Virginia, the colony of Jamestown was still surviving—if barely. In the spring of 1610, after receiving desperately needed food supplies from overseas, and in honor of surviving the famine-wrought winter of 1609, the 60 of 490 colonists who were still living and breathing (many of whom had already resorted to eating their horses, and their deceased neighbors) gave thanks and commemorated eking out another year in their new land.
Some nine years later, in 1619, Captain John Woodlief and the ship Margaret arrived in Chesapeake Bay. The vessel proceeded up the James River and on December 4, 1619, stopped at what was known as Berkeley: “the Great Plantation.” Captain Woodlief instructed those aboard to pray. “We ordaine that this day of our ships arrival, at the place assigned for plantacon, in the land of Virginia, shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God,” Woodlief wrote. Roughly one year later, in 1620, the aptly named ship Supply also docked at Berkeley Plantation, this time helmed by one Captain William Tracy. The Supply brought fifty new residents, and the day was again celebrated—a second “annual” thanksgiving . . . for the time being, at least.
And so there were harvest festivals, and there were thanksgivings for blessings received of whichever god you happened to worship, and there were also thanksgivings for saving republics from a fiery fate, as well as thanksgivings for successful travel and for survival. Soon these rituals and their associated words—these festivals and thanksgivings, secular and religious alike—became intertwined in this new land. “Thanksgivings” began to conflate over time, somewhat organically, and perhaps not surprisingly, over many years. If gratitude was, as Cicero had so eloquently put it, the parent of all other virtues, gratitude’s children had developed some very malleable personalities. Gratitude and giving thanks—on this continent, let alone in the world—was perhaps the most common of human concepts, one that was universally valued but increasingly locally flavored.
By the time Sarah Josepha Hale decided to make an annual, national thanksgiving holiday a mission of hers in the United States, not only had the concept of thanksgiving celebrations long predated the one she envisioned, it also long predated the festivities she herself had grown up with in New England. In the northern reaches of the states there were days of thanksgiving, prayer, and fasting that had preceded the American Revolution. An annual spring fast and an annual thanksgiving at the time of harvest were custom. By the early nineteenth century, there were many homes that celebrated days designated by governors and other community dignitaries as thanksgivings, with a large gathering of friends and a table full of food.
For Hale, now, the thanksgiving she proposed to see practiced across all the states and territories in America would resemble in flavor the kinds that she herself treasured. But what she sought most was to have every American pause to give thanks at the same time each year, across the country. That would be the message she would begin to trumpet in the pages of her magazine and in the letters she would soon write. If nothing else, she was rooted in her present.
She wanted to further that which unified, which called people to gather as one.
Hale would likely have appreciated the words long used by Haudenosaunee, or the Iroquois Confederacy of Five (eventually Six) Nations:
“Now our minds are one” is a repeated refrain taken from the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, or Gano:nyok. This translates as “words that come before all else.” For gratitude shall come before all else. The Six Nations of the Iroquois—the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, Mohawk, and Tuscarora—employ this thanksgiving address on many occasions, to express gratitude not just on any one particular day but throughout the year, and they give this thanks not for one particular thing but for all things: Water. Animals. Mother Earth. The moon and the stars. The address offers “greetings to the natural world.”
When it came to gratitude, there was no mistaking: It was here long before the Europeans came, and would remain long after. But when it came to what thanksgiving in the new America might be, minds were rarely one. Hale had an idea of how she wanted her particular holiday to look. She made no claims about who did what first. She knew only what it was she wanted the country to do next.