EXTRA...

How did Thanksgiving become Turkey Day?

How Did Thanksgiving Get to Be Turkey Day?
The All-American feast took its time becoming the holiday we all celebrate today.

Thanksgiving didn't come into the world fully formed. We don't even know when the first Thanksgiving Day took place, only that it was sometime between Sept. 21 and Nov. 9, 1621.

The Pilgrims certainly had no idea of founding an annual holiday, either. The first Thanksgiving was strictly a one-shot event. Similar ad hoc days of thanksgiving were proclaimed from time to time in Massachusetts over the next 50 years--usually by the churches, rather than by the civil authorities--but it was Connecticut that made Thanksgiving an annual event, starting around 1647.

The custom of having an annual Thanksgiving Day spread throughout New England in the 17th Century, but as yet it did not include any idea of commemorating the First Thanksgiving. If anything was commemorated, it was a later Thanksgiving when the crops had failed and the Massachusetts Bay Colony came very close to starvation.

In 1631, everybody was down to a daily ration of just five grains of corn when a day of fasting and prayer was proclaimed for Feb. 22. Miraculously, on that day a ship returned from England with food supplies, the colony was saved and the fast day turned into a feast. There is a very old New England custom, now mostly forgotten, of serving every diner five grains of corn before the meal in memory of the hardship and the deliverance of that year.

The holiday actually met a certain amount of resistance as it spread. Since the "pagan" holiday of Christmas was not celebrated in Massachusetts until the 19th Century, Thanksgiving was often thought of as essentially a Puritan substitute for Christmas... Read the rest in the LA Times. Below is a feature on the holiday in 1908. To see it larger click the image here.
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