Thanksgiving: history, traditions, and cultural significance

Introduction Turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing and pumpkin pie. These are the things that come to the mind of most people when they think about Thanksgiving—and that’s fine. Many major holidays and cultural traditions do revolve around food as a form of significance and celebration. Food is such a major touchstone for many nations, ethnic heritages and cultures and for good reason. Food is a major human biological event; it sustains life and health, is enjoyable and is a massive part of major economies. However, thanksgiving is so much more than a rich meal and expressing fleeting sentiments of gratitude. The following paragraphs will explore all the angles you can take when exploring thanksgiving, particularly ones that offer a more non-traditional approach to the holiday. After reading this article, you should have lots of fodder to create the best thanksgiving essay with a more unique perspective than your peers. 


Thanksgiving Meaning The meaning of Thanksgiving really is specific to the individual person celebrating the holiday. Like so many American traditions, it to is subject to the individualities of the people who celebrate it. For some people, the holiday represents relaxing and fun: they focus on the time off from work, a nice big meal, football games and seeing family. For other people, the meaning of Thanksgiving revolves around stress and expectation, lots of travel and fighting crowds. For others, the holiday involves some cursory family stuff and then hitting the sales on black Friday with specials that seep into the weekend.
Regardless of the fact that everyone tends to have their own personal traditions, the meaning of Thanksgiving fundamentally revolves around sincere expressions of gratitude, particularly gratitude for others. Just as the Pilgrims celebrated their surviving members and safety, Thanksgiving functions around collecting together in manifestations of unity. Gatherings among friends and family are about more than following traditions; they help remind us that people need people in order to survive. Human contact and community building mean that people are stronger and support one another. Thanksgiving is another expression of the importance humans represent—for other humans. While many families have a variety of traditions, at the core of each of them is the notion that people need people. Part of the meaning of Thanksgiving is a means of honoring this fundamental concept of human life.
[ text from this essay is missing, view full version to see entire paper. ]

Thanksgiving History Much of the actual Thanksgiving history has been riddled in legend and lore. It is important to weed the facts from the mythology of this tradition. So many school children are taught that the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving in a peaceful meal with the native peoples, during their first November here in the Americas. For a long time in early U.S. history, Thanksgiving was just an occasional holiday that certain presidents, such as George Washington would recognize (Johnson, 2017). It was Sarah Joseph Hale who attempted to cajole several presidents into making it a national holiday and it was Abraham Lincoln who finally granted it as such (Johnson, 2017).
Lincoln made it the last Thursday in November and Franklin D. Roosevelt later changed this to the fourth Thursday of November (set by Roosevelt in 1939 and approved by Congress in 1941), so as not to interfere too much with the Christmas holidays and the seasonal economies created during this time (Johnson, 2017). In reality, the actual Thanksgiving that the pilgrims celebrated was at some uncertain date between September 21 and November 9th: many historians believe it to be in early October. However, selecting the fourth Thursday of November was a presidential move that attempted to connect the Thanksgiving celebration with the safe arrival of the Mayflower at Cape Cod which was sometime in mid November (November 11th or 21st, depending on which calendar used.
A few primary sources do discuss the first Thanksgiving, such as Edward Winslow’s perspective on it recorded in a letter and William Bradford in 1854 his History of Plymouth Plantation. Both of these documents discuss common themes that are still treasured in our understanding of Thanksgiving today: turkey (and other types of fowl),
[ text from this essay is missing, view full version to see entire paper. ]