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.

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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,...
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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),

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How We Celebrate

Modern day Thanksgiving celebration revolves around a turkey as the main dish. The importance of the turkey in modern traditions cannot be underestimated. Many families have their own special recipes and methods for cooking it so that it is “just right.” Some of these methods include techniques like cooking the turkey upside down, cooking it wrapped inside a paper bag, covering it with a cheese cloth and basting it vigorously with butter, or cooking it covered in slices of apple—so that it doesn’t dry out. Just as cooking the turkey is subject to individualized preferences, the other dishes are often just as individualized.

For instance, standard side dishes at Thanksgiving dinners such as cranberry sauce, stuffing, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes and others are just as subject to individualized processes and preferences. Some families prefer a cranberry sauce that is jammier, others prefer one that is jellied. Some add brandy or whiskey to the cranberry sauce; others add honey as a sweetener instead of sugar. Similarly, even with a dish as seemingly traditional as stuffing or even mashed potatoes, these too are subjected to the whims and traditions of each family. Some households make the stuffing using a mix; others would be horrified to do that, insisting on creating the stuffing from scratch.



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Conclusion

Thus, your Thanksgiving essay should empower you to explore some of the more traditional concepts of Thanksgiving Day in a manner that is more avante garde. Your Thanksgiving essay should give you the opportunity to eliminate some of the mythologies connected to the holiday, and shed light on where they came from. This piece of writing should also offer a perspective on how the more common traditions took hold and…