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Thanksgiving
Cultural Implications of Thanksgiving, Then and Now
How did the first Thanksgiving affect the culture of the time and also how does it affect our culture today?
The first Thanksgiving Day celebrations were not necessarily held on the same day of each year. Rather they were proclaimed by various ministers and governors to celebrate specific events that might include items such as a particularly good harvest or some sort of military victory (Smith, 2003). However, the first pilgrims' also understood that they needed to increase their population in order to survive in the new world and they must increase the immigration trend to the new land. It was this understanding that lead to the first dramatizations of the Thanksgiving holiday. During this period, the tales of feast were meant to make the promise of this new world more appealing to those who were considering migrating from the fear of religious persecution among other reasons.
Currently, Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday that is celebrated on the U.S. On the fourth Thursday in November of each year. Although the first Thanksgiving were actually an elaborate and expensive ritual that represented a time of abundance in regards to resources, they bear little resemblance to the stories that...
(Wallendorf & Arnould, 1991). The only commonalities that exist are the fact that these festivals represented a ritual in which one would feast on these material abundances in celebration. However, the stories in the modern culture that perpetuate about the original Thanksgiving are dramatically exaggerated and heavily commercialized to fit the modern day paradigm of material consumption in the "Holiday Season" that represents a major component of the modern day American economy.
However, the concept of the holiday has undergone a long evolution throughout the course of history before today's notion of the holiday became perpetuated. The great expansion of the culture of consumption in the last decades of the nineteenth century helped shift this basic socioeconomic perspective of the Thanksgiving holiday; holidays were originally thought to be more of an impediment to industrial production, holidays were found, on the flip side, to have all kinds of possibilities when it came to consumption (Schmidt, 1991). Working conditions were harsh in the early industrial period and the owners of capital would push their employees to their maximum capacities which did not include any time off for holidays or festivals.
Yet it was during this period that the early…
Works Cited
Schmidt, L. (1991). The Commercialization of the Calendar: American Holidays and the Culture of Consumption,. The Journal of American History, 887-916.
Siskind, J. (1992). The Invention of Thanksgiving: A ritual of American nationality. Critique of Anthropology, 167-191.
Smith, A. (2003). The First Thanksgiving. Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, 79-85.
Wallendorf, M., & Arnould, E. (1991). "We Gather Together": Consumption Rituals of Thanksgiving Day. Journal of Consumer Research, 13-31.
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