What does the poem Mary Had a Little Lamb and Thanksgiving becoming a national holiday have in common?
Sarah Joseph Hale, born in New Hampshire in 1788, is largely responsible for both.
After being widowed, and with five children to support, Sarah wrote poetry as a
way to make a living, and one of her most enduring poems is Mary Had a Little Lamb. Sarah became the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, a family-oriented magazine in 1841. As editor, she began to crusade for a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to commemorate the pilgrims’ famous feast. Interestingly, the southern part of the United States was slow to get on board, as they considered the feast of 1610, when supply ships finally reached Virginia, to be a more important occasion.
Thanksgiving was unofficially celebrated in the Northeast and Midwest throughout the 1840s and 1850s, but it wasn’t until the contingency of southern states were absent from congress, due to the Civil War, that Abraham Lincoln was able to declare Thanksgiving Day as a national holiday in 1863. For some time after the way, the southern states considered Thanksgiving a Yankee Abolitionist Holiday, but eventually unity was reestablished and turkey and cranberries became part of a national tradition.
Now, about the turkey…
In Sarah’s day, people assumed that the pilgrims ate turkey as part of their feast due to the abundance of wild turkeys on the east coast, while in actuality, they probably ate venison. A turkey is a practical centerpiece for a celebratory dinner, being larger than a goose and able to feed more people. Godey’s Lady’s Book featured many recipes for Thanksgiving and many of them featured turkey. Other publications pushed the idea of turkey being the traditional protein for the Thanksgiving feast, including Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle, which in 1882 announced, “Every person who can afford a turkey or procure it will sacrifice the noble American fowl to-day.”
Do you celebrate with a traditional turkey dinner? Or do you create your own traditions?
