(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange has been reflecting on the origins – and meaning of – Thanksgiving.
(LANGE) Thanksgiving is an ancient ritual and an even more ancient response of people who from time to time have inexplicably had their fat pulled from the fire, and have attributed their deliverance not to chance or luck, but to some higher power. In pre-scientific days it was almost always God who got the credit. I’ve recently read an account of the convoy of three Hudson’s Bay Company ships from Gravesend, England, to York Factory in Hudson Bay in 1819. Beset by icebergs and foul tides, threatened by uncharted rocks and fitful winds, misled by unreliable compasses, forced by a major leak to man the pumps around the clock, and fearing one of the ships had been lost, they nevertheless finally anchored at their destination with a feeling of gratitude that – as 19th-century explorers used to write – can be more easily imagined than described.
I don’t think that nowadays we feel as keenly a sense of deliverance from the perils that surround us – the Damoclean sword of nuclear weapons, threats of terrorism and pandemic, foundering economies and unemployment, and many others. We don’t have to fend off the icebergs ourselves, or turn to at two in the morning to man the pumps for four hours; we have specialists we pay to take care of those things for us. Thanksgiving has become for us more a ritual than an occasion of gratitude for gifts we don’t deserve – in fact, couldn’t deserve. We often call the holiday Turkey Day, as if to avoid overt expressions of obligation or emotion.
Days of thanksgiving go back many centuries, but our modern celebration is only 145 years old. Delivered from a major threat to the Union and its army by the victory at Gettysburg, and buoyed by the fall of Vicksburg, splitting the Confederacy along the seam of the Mississippi River, the country could at last see the end of one of the bloodiest wars ever fought, in which almost a million men were lost. A prominent woman editor, Sarah Josepha Hale, had prodded four previous presidents to proclaim a national day of thanksgiving; with Abraham Lincoln, her efforts finally bore fruit. The proclamation he issued doesn’t display his usual inspiring rhetoric – it was written by the Secretary of State, William Seward – but its effect has been permanent: After a few changes in date to accommodate merchants interested in lengthening the holiday shopping season, Thanksgiving has settled on the fourth Thursday of November.
One feature of thanksgiving that’s often overlooked – even though it’s mentioned in the Proclamation – is our need to ensure that others less fortunate have some benefit of the blessings we enjoy. Thanksgiving is not the end of the line; our obligation is not ended when we give thanks. The expression of gratitude is, rather, only a part of a large circle in which we, receiving whatever blessings of which we’re sensible, pass them on to others beside us in the circle, but less fortunate. Only then is the act of thanksgiving complete.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, wishing you a wonderful Thanksgiving.