Thanksgiving in the New World

We tend to think of Thanksgiving as a uniquely North American holiday, but its roots are embedded in the mists of time. The November harvest festival that British-American pilgrims celebrated, prior to emigration, was called the Feast of St. Martin, or Martinmas. 

The first New England settlers were zealously pious British separatists and Puritans who left Britain during the Protestant Reformation. The dour Puritans believed the Church of England’s reforms did not go far enough in breaking away from Catholic tradition, and so they left Britain for the Netherlands.

The Pilgrims even found the Protestant Dutch of Leiden who gave them safe harbor from Britain, too lenient, hence the 1620 voyage on the Mayflower to establish a strict, if not a downright grim, religious utopia in the New World. After a reading, we went to the Pilgrim’s Pub in Delftshaven, raised a few pints at the place where the pilgrims shoved off for America.

The Wampanoag Nation, the “People of the First Light,” saved the Pilgrims from starvation during that harsh winter of 1620–21. But they too had an agenda shaped by years of tense interaction with European explorers and fur trappers, plague and disease—not to mention displacement. And you know what that led to.

When I brought home the usual Thanksgiving tropes from second grade, the hand-traced turkey, cut-out pilgrim hats, collars and buckles, instead of admiring my handiwork, my Irish grandmother grumbled that American Thanksgiving was a Protestant holiday. 

I was shocked, and fearful of losing my favorite holiday, I didn't know what she was referring to at the time. I didn't have my history down. However, I am thankful that the holiday has become re-secularized over time as it's my favorite holiday (and sometimes my birthday too)—despite its interim origin and political implications. 

Thanksgiving is merely a Protestant-American spin-off on an ancient harvest celebration—updated to expunge longstanding Catholic (and pagan) traditions centered around the feast of Martinmas, or Old Halloween, cognate with the Irish festival of Samhain/Calan Gaeaf— replete with gift giving. Samhain was not only the New Year, but also a time when the gates to the Otherworld were open. In Wales too, the entrance to the Otherworld (Annwn) was thin. Magic (and the dead) was afoot. 

Martinmas marked the end of the harvest season and beginning of winter and the "winter revelling season". Traditions include feasting on 'Martinmas goose' or 'Martinmas beef', drinking the first wine of the season, and mumming.

So this year, we celebrated an unThanksgiving of sorts, small bubble gatherings. In our case, it was just me, my cousin and a friend. A far cry from the the days of thundering herds of relatives, friends, and orphans, where dinner was served on doors propped up on sawhorse planks in the yard because there weren’t tables long enough to go the distance. 

Who remembers staging boxing matches with pitted black olive puppets on all of our fingers? And eating the losers? Playing conkers or marbles with loose cranberries, or sword-fighting with the crudités? Pasting deviled eggs on your nose? Stealing food before dinner? Strange gelatin salads and odd casseroles. Smoking dope in the closet with the cousins and fooling no one? That momentous graduation from the kids’s table to the big table.

Harvest festivals were traditionally linked with the September harvest moon or the October(ish) hunter's moon (first full moon in October or November): my Canadian cousin reminded me that Canada celebrates Thanksgiving, which predates our Thanksgiving by 22 years, in October. (But there were multiple Thanksgivings, by nationality—truly a movable feast.) Germany’s Erntedankfest, is celebrated at the end of September or early October, aka Octave of Allhallowtide. Goose was the turkey of choice, as turkeys were introduced from North America.

The Old English name for November was Blōtmōnaþ ('sacrifice month'). One could easily add the Celtic New Year, Samhain into this litany of feasts list (after all, Samhain was the Celtic New Year’s Eve). Christmas and New Year were winter holidays moved to coincide with calendrical reform. 

St. Martin distributed food to the poor on horseback, and gave presents to the children who made turnip, or paper lanterns to guide his way. During the English Reformation, festivities were expunged, the bonfires reignited as Guy Fawkes Night.

(The Julian calendar was recalibrated by Pope Gregory XIII, in October, 1582, The Brits were a couple of centuries behind in implementing the Gregorian Calendar. Britain and its colonies resisted, because it was a Catholic edict, but succumbed to the Gregorian calendar on September 1, 1752. By that point the calendar was off by 11 days—the reboot caused riots.)

The feast of St. Martin, Christianized from the old pagan harvest festivities, was as big as Christmas, besides bonfires, mumming and mayhem, there was so much exorbitant feasting and drinking, that in the 6th c., the Catholic church established a post St. Martin-fast until the Epiphany. 

After gorging ourselves silly on Thanksgiving, we still make those collective vows to our expanding waistlines, to eat less leading up to the Christmas season. And then we begin those vows anew after the New Year. 

Rev. 11/23, (ref. The Atlantic, Wiki and Medievalists.)