Lincoln's Forgotten First Thanksgiving

Most adults are quite aware that the "Pilgrims and Indians" setup is at best a caricature and the founding of a nation is messy, anyway. Sure, it is a day of giving thanks (or, as George Washington called it, "Publick Thanksgivin"), but other than the torturous "let's all say something we're thankful for while the food gets cold", most folks today don't really honor that part of the holiday.

Why don't we reframe our perspective?

The first Thanksgiving wasn't about food--it was about survival. It was the first bountiful harvest in a new world. It was a celebratory feast and a small Thank You to (some) of the folks who had taught them how to survive. It also was a brief moment of success, because unexpected ships arrived from England shortly after, filled with hungry people and no supplies. As one poet put it, "we have pumpkin and morning, and pumpkin at noon, if it were not for pumpkin, we would be undoon"*. Other sources say that food was rationed down to five kernels of corn in order to try and survive that winter. Regardless, that feast was a bright spot in the middle of a Really Tough Time.

Days of Thanksgiving were celebrated intermittently up until 1863, when the first annual Thanksgiving was announced. You might recognize 1863 as an important year--that was the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and several major Civil War battles. In the midst of this, President Lincoln asked people to set aside a day to give thanks that the impact of war was fairly limited to the areas of battle and pray that peace would come quickly.

Lincoln was right--historically, war often results in widespread famine, and the famines of the American Civil War were comparatively localized. But Lincoln's Thanksgiving wasn't just about being thankful for what we had: it was a call to be thankful for a good future that was free from violence and oppression. It takes a lot of bravery to be thankful for something you don't have yet.

Right now, we need some of Lincoln's Thanksgiving spirit. While every day seems to bring more bad news, the future is not set: it may be a long road to Better, and there may be more Really Tough Times before we get there, but being thankful helps us visualize where we are going and help us get there safely.

Some ideas to help your students understand this:

For Hands-On Learners: Arts and crafts time! Build a vision board of something you are thankful will happen.

For Auditory Learners: Have a conversation about Lincoln's proclamation and why he might have wanted people to celebrate Thanksgiving when they were in the middle of war. If you have students with mixed learning types and differnet ages, this is a good activity to do while preparing food as a family.

For Visual Learners: Create a Thankfulness Board. Print the iconic Gettysburg Address picture and put it in the middle of a piece of carboard (an old Amazon box works great!) and have students add post-its with items they are thankful for. For older students, have them create a flow-chart of the major events of 1863 and talk about how they might have influenced Lincoln's decision to ask the American people to celebrate Thanksgiving.

For Reading/Writing Learners: Let your students translate Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation into modern English. Bonus points for turning it into a creative writing exercise! You can find a printable version of President Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation here.

If you share your projects to social media, be sure to tag us!

*The internet now credits this line to a song called "New England's Annoyances", but I first read it in a very old book called Virginia, Ho! and seem to recall the poem's author was a young woman. My suspicion is that the young lady likely penned it, and then someone else incorporated the iconic final line (with some spelling and grammatical changes) into the song. The internet is unhelpful in tracking down the book, as there is an author named Virginia Ho, and I don't remember which book box this particular book is stored in.