There’s no law that says you have to serve turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
And there’s no evidence that turkeys were served at what is depicted as the first Thanksgiving Day when the pilgrims in New England sat down with the Wampanoag people in 1621. The Wampanoag brought deer and the pilgrims provided “wild fowl”, most likely duck or geese. This event wasn’t considered unusual and there was no 17th century reference to it at all except in one letter by a pilgrim colonist Edward Winslow.
In fact, days (and meals) of thanksgiving were common in America’s colonial communities to celebrate the harvest. It wasn’t until a writer named Sarah Josepha Hale wrote a whole chapter in her 1827 novel Northwoods devoted to preparing a turkey to be placed at the head of the table for a thanksgiving meal that turkey became very popular for that purpose. About the same time she started campaigning to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, an effort that paid off with a presidential proclamation by Abraham Lincoln in 1863.
During this time, in 1841, a collection of Pilgrim stories referred to the meal described by Winslow as “the first Thanksgiving” and a national mythology formed around it. Winslow didn’t mention turkeys, but fellow colonist William Bradford, in a journal in 1856, referred to a “great store of wild turkies.” Somehow the cultural link between pilgrims, turkeys, and Thanksgiving became a part of America’s national identify.
What is still true is that there’s a day set aside to be thankful. No matter what we eat that day, thankfulness is the top priority of the day. And Randy and I are indeed thankful and incredibly blessed for the life we are living.
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