How did the Thanksgiving tradition come about? Of course we have a good idea of the original Thanksgiving, in 1621 when the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians shared a meager meal together after a very harsh year. However, the odds are pretty good they were not eating turkey with oyster stuffing and passing out plates full of pumpkin pie. Nor were they playing football or watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The roots of many of our modern Thanksgiving Day traditions are rooted less in the Pilgrims’ story and more in marketing.

There have been several dates for Thanksgiving Day over the years. The New England Christian churches - particularly those of Puritan background - had days of prayer and fasting in autumn to humble themselves and give thanks to God for the harvest. This was ended with a community feast. No particular date was set on the calendar for these days of fasting because the Puritans railed against some of the annual pagan celebrations of harvest gods. Instead, their leaders sent out a proclamation to determine the date of their Thanksgiving Day for that particular year. In 1777, the Continental Congress asked the thirteen colonies to hold a day of thanksgiving after the American victory over the British at Saratoga, October 7, 1777. George Washington issued a presidential decree to have a Thanksgiving Day on November 26, 1789 after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. He also issued a later decree, naming Thursday, February 19, 1895 as the day of thanks. John Adams followed Washington with presidential decrees, naming May 9, 1798 and April 25, 1799 as days of national "fasting and humiliation”, beckoning back to his Puritan roots. James Madison issued a similar decree after the War of 1812 had come to an end, naming Thanksgiving Day to be the second Thursday of April in 1815. Roll the time machine forward half a century to the time of the American Civil War. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln named the last Thursday of November to be the day of National Thanksgiving.

Up to this point, Thanksgiving Day had been all about reflection upon the condition of your soul, God’s goodness to you, remembering war victories and the like. After the Civil War, people began to celebrate the gathering of their family on Thanksgiving Day. Since the war had separated families, the gathering aspect of the family became more of a centerpiece of the day. Since this meant more people around your dinner table, a large meal was needed. By the early 20^th century, families coming together for a day when work stopped opened up the possibility for targeted marketing to take place. Specialty foods were sold as "traditional” fare for the Thanksgiving Day feast. These were foods from a variety of sources and unlike those eaten throughout the rest of the year. The marketing of Thanksgiving Day food became big business as the meal became the focal point of the celebration. Turkey had been eaten for some time, but did not become the centerpiece for the meal until after World War II. There were two powerful forces at work to make this happen. First, there was a very popular wartime painting by Norman Rockwell. It is often wrongly titled "Thanksgiving”, but the oil painting was originally part of a series called the "Four Freedoms”, based upon Franklin Roosevelt’s state of the Union address in 1940. The correct title of the painting is "Freedom from Want.” The illustration shows a grandmother placing a roasted turkey in the middle of a table as her family waits to partake of the bird. The illustration actually ran on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in March of 1943 and was intended to drum up support for the war. However, it became the symbol of traditional Thanksgiving Day meal. The second force responsible for the Thanksgiving Day turkey was the poultry industry and its development of hybrid turkey farming that produced larger birds. With the Rockwell image of what a traditional American Thanksgiving looked like and the poultry industry’s marketing efforts, the turkey became the central part of the meal. Today 270 million turkeys are sold for Thanksgiving Day meals. To this point, in 1935, the average American consumed 1.7 pounds of turkey meat per year. In 2011, the average American consumed 20 pounds of the bird, albeit not all on Thanksgiving Day.

But there are other traditions tied to Thanksgiving beyond the food. In 1924, Macy’s Department Store began to host an annual parade through the streets of New York. Thanksgiving had taken a serious turn away from its humble roots of as a day of reflection to the launching pad for the Christmas purchasing season. Macy’s used the gathering of family to focus on one particular target market: children. Macy’s used large balloons in the shape of cartoon characters to attract hoards of children to their New York parade. The Macy’s parade was even capped off by the appearance of Santa Claus, intended to get children into their stores to sit on the jolly old elf’s lap while their mothers made purchases at the department stores.

Macy’s aim to boost the holiday shopping season was not the only hint that marketing was driving the decisions on Thanksgiving Day. For the most part, Lincoln’s calculation was used for Thanksgiving until 1939. In the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the second to last Thursday in November. Thanksgiving was beginning to take shape as a day to prepare for the Christmas shopping season, not for soulful reflection and humility. FDR reasoned that this gave an extra week for Christmas shopping and would be good for the sagging economy. However, people loved the last Thursday of the month tradition and refused to honor Roosevelt’s proclamation. In 1941, Roosevelt and Congress compromised and named the fourth Thursday of November to be the official Thanksgiving Day: the date we still observe.

Let’s not leave sports marketing out of the day. In 1934, the fledgling National Football League tried an experiment. For years, amateur football teams had played championship games on Thanksgiving Day. The NFL had just placed a new professional franchise in Detroit and they needed a gimmick to sell seats. They tried a marketing experiment. They announced that the Detroit Lions would host their new NFL rivals, the Chicago Bears, on Thanksgiving afternoon. The game attracted 26,000 fans. The Lions have played every Thanksgiving Day since with the exception of the years encompassing WWII.

Are your Thanksgiving Day activities traditions or the result of some very clever marketing? You might find that what you are eating, watching, and doing on a day traditionally designed for giving thanks is being sold to you. Does that mean you cannot give thanks in the midst of the "marketing” tradition? I believe that thankfulness is more of a heart issue than a consumable product or an entertainment venue. Guard that place in your own heart and I think you will maintain the intent of those folks who started the real tradition in Plymouth 320 years ago.

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National Thanksgiving Proclamations, Pilgrim Hall Museum, http://www.pilgrimhall.org/ThanxProc.htm

Thanksgiving: Fact or Fiction, History.com, http://www.history.com/topics/thanksgiving-quiz

The Food of Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving History, by Malcolm Richards, http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/environmental-studies/courses/es-399%20home/es-399-05/Projects/Thanksgiving/thanksgiving%20history.htm