The Story of Thanksgiving

In the autumn of 1621, the English settlers at Plymouth and the Wampanoag people shared a harvest feast — three days of eating, games, and getting along, after the settlers' first good corn harvest. Nobody called it "Thanksgiving" at the time. Days set apart for prayer and gratitude were already an old custom on both sides of the Atlantic.

For the next two hundred years or so, thanksgiving days stayed local — a colony or a town would declare one when there was something to be grateful for. The national holiday came out of the Civil War. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving for the whole country, hoping gratitude might help bind up a wounded nation. Congress finally settled it on the fourth Thursday of November in 1941. And honesty asks for one more note: since 1970, many Native Americans have kept this same date as a National Day of Mourning, remembering what colonization cost their peoples. Both of those truths can sit at the same table.

In the Grove: Thanksgiving is gratitude with its eyes open — for the harvest, for the hands that grew it, and for the whole complicated story that brought us to the table.