The Completely True History of America: Thanksgiving

Today the United States of America celebrates its oldest holiday, Thanksgiving. In remembrance of a grand festival in which Pilgrims and Native Americans celebrated the great harvest and their perfect friendship in 1621, a couple hundred million  Americans will gather with friends and family to commit the deadly sin of gluttony by gorging themselves on Turkey. Everybody participates from

Squash

New England, where a ridiculous number of them will also partake in squash, to Texas, where they will eat copious amounts of cornbread. (Source: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-what-your-part-of-america-eats-on-thanksgiving/)

Of course, this isn't actually America's oldest holiday and the fact that it's celebrated annually today has little, if anything, to do with the Pilgrims of 1621. The Pilgrims did celebrate a feast that they called Thanksgiving, but it wasn't annual and it wasn't the first Thanksgiving celebrated in what would become the United States. Virginia likes to claim it held the first Thanksgiving in 1610. This version of events almost certainly wouldn't have included any natives since as we've discussed at length, the colonists and natives were pretty enormous dicks to each other. This probably isn't true either. In reality the first American Thanksgiving was likely celebrated by Spanish people either in Florida in 1565 or Texas in 1598. Naturally only people from Texas would think 1598 came before 1565.

From colonial times all the way up through the first few decades of the United States, days of Thanksgiving would be sporadically declared by governors or presidents, but never annually and rarely on the same day across localities. In the early 1800's New England Calvanists were the only

Hale Showing Off a Lot of Shoulder for 1831

ones routinely celebrating the holiday. This is where Sarah Josepha Hale enters the story. Hale was an author and magazine editor known primarily for the following things (in no particular order):

1) Writing the poem 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'
2) Advocating for women's rights

Hale really, really loved Thanksgiving. She loved it so much that over the course of 40 years she petitioned five different presidents to make it an annual federal holiday. In her petitions she advocated for the holiday on the grounds of its religious and moral merits and the fact that she believed it could be a source of unity for the ever growing United States and its vast cultural differences. These may or may not have been the real reasons as one anonymous sources swears he could have heard her say, "Those ungrateful little shits that I birthed never say thank you for what I do for them. I'll be damned if I don't make it a federal law that they have to thank me."

Finally, in 1863 Hale's point about national unity got through to Abraham Lincoln who in the midst of the Civil War thought, "You know what would make Texas like us more? If we forced them to participate in a holiday currently only celebrated widely in New England." He didn't make it an annual holiday by law, but did declare it both in 1863 and 1864 on the last Thursday of November and every president thereafter declared it a federal holiday each year at the same time until FDR. His plan, predictably, didn't do jack shit on the unity front. The south didn't recognize the holiday until 1870's after the completion of reconstruction.

In the 1930's it was considered taboo for stores to advertise Christmas goods before Thanksgiving. In the 1930's there was also this small event going on that is commonly referred to as the Great Depression. Because of these things, in 1939 FDR came up with a fantastic plan. If Thanksgiving is moved up a week, the Christmas season will also be extended by a week, the people will use the money that they don't have to buy extra Christmas presents during the extra week, and the depression will be over. Armed with his brilliant idea, FDR declared the second to last Thursday in November to be Thanksgiving. The move angered Republicans who very wisely believed that the move was a purely political move meant to demean the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Because of this, only

23 states observed the new date and 22 states did not. The remaining states, including Texas, observed both days because they were lazy and didn't want to work and also because they enjoyed eating obscene amounts of food.

Finally in December 1941, after three years under the FDR plan, Congress decided the economy was expanding too rapidly and passed a law declaring Thanksgiving to be the final Thursday of November. The Senate, citing a need for occasional economic growth, passed the bill with an amendment making it always be the fourth Thursday of the month meaning that in the less frequent five Thursday Novembers it would be the second to last Thursday of the month. For several years a handful of states continued to ignore the federal guidance and celebrate the occasion on the last Thursday of the month including in five Thursday years. The last state to do so was, of course, Texas in 1956.

And that is the story of why the state of Texas is Thanksgiving's equivalent of the Grinch. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!