Even though we live in the freest country in the world – a land of unprecedented opportunities, liberties, and advantages – study after study reveals that the more American's have, the less fulfilled and content we feel. The Thanksgiving season, then, is a suitable time to reflect on what truly constitutes the good life, and to look back at the original Thanksgiving story to see what it can teach us about the origins of true happiness.
I love this season of the year. The thanksgiving celebrations I had growing up in the 1950's and 1960's were spent with the family at my grandmother's home. It brings back so many good memories in Minnesota. Dad and mom would gather the five children together and begin the 3 ½ hour journey from Austin to Heron Lake. If you know the Minnesota terrain, by the time we reached Albert Lea, about 30 miles down the road, we asked, “Are we there yet.” The seven of us piled into the station wagon and drove three hours to get to grandmother's place. My family involved seven persons, and other relatives as well. She usually invited a friend whom she knew might spend Thanksgiving alone, or a couple who had no one else to spend the holidays with. On occasion, someone would simply quickly visit. That was all right. There was always room for a few more. Why? Because there was plenty of food at the table on Thanksgiving Day. We did not pray before meals in general. However, at thanksgiving time we did. After the prayer of thanks to God, we ate a feast of turkey and ham with all the trimmings. When the meal was over, the women picked up the dishes and cleaned up. The men went into the living room and watched football. About an hour after the meal, grandma came around with a tray full of deserts. We complained about being too full, but we took the desert anyway. Before the afternoon was over, she brought turkey and ham sandwiches for us. This was one time of the year it was all right to stuff ourselves with food. In those moments, anxiety, worry, and fear seemed far away.
In 2002, I made many trips to Minnesota. Dad died one year, and mom died the next. I had some wonderful conversations with Dad, conversations we needed to have. He had many difficult times in his life. He wanted affirmation from his father, an affirmation he never received. He thought he had to make it alone in life. He was a man who shared very little of what he felt. In fact, in my last visits he lamented that he had taken people that he cared about for granted. He did not say, “I love you,” enough. He wished he had spent more time with his children. I know part of it was his generation. The depression and World War II were serious business. One worked hard. Even though I assured him that he had made an important contribution to his five children and wife, I know what he means. We can take so many of the good things in life for granted. People in any generation can do that.
Thanksgiving Day is a national celebration but observed in unique ways by the families of this nation.
There was nothing about the Mayflower Compact or how the Pilgrim tradition was a key element in the formation of the United States as a self-governing society.
The criticism we now hear of the pilgrims is rising. For some, the Pilgrims’ only notable traits were that they “robbed graves” and “took land” of people who were living in what is today the United States. The origin of the Pilgrims, their ideas, and motivations, are entirely irrelevant in this view. Such persons brush aside any context for their actions. What matters is that they portray them as white European oppressors, who showed up and shattered a presumed utopia, where people did not seize land, spread disease, or brutalize their fellow humanity. Were the Pilgrims and Puritans sometimes brutish and unjust in how they dealt with the tribal people they met in the New World? Yes, some certainly were. Were the Pilgrims a uniquely rapacious people, devils in human form who came to terrorize and plunder the people they met in the New World? Hardly.
One could say the same thing about the Native American tribes of the New World, too. The simplistic story of unique European oppression leaves out how some tribes were eager to enlist European newcomers in their wars to eradicate other Native American tribes in continuation of conflicts that long predated Europeans’ arrival. The Wampanoags that partook in the first, famed Pilgrim Thanksgiving wanted a new ally to gain an edge against the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, a rival set of tribes in the Northeast region of what became the United States. In the 1640s, the Iroquois waged a war of annihilation against the Huron and other tribes in the Great Lakes region in the so-called Beaver Wars. Just as various tribes, kingdoms, and nations went to war with each other in Europe, so too did the various peoples of the New World wage war on, enslave, and obliterate their neighbors.
The settled civilizations of South America, such as the Aztecs, used neighboring tribes as sacrificial cattle. Their downfall at the hands of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes came only with the help of those formerly oppressed tribes that hated the Aztecs more than the newcomers.
The world the Pilgrims arrived in at the Plymouth Colony was both blood-soaked and had changed hands many times long before they arrived. If we really want to view history as some grand morality tale to find out who the angels and who the devils are, why should Native American Indian tribes get a pass as we condemn the Pilgrims?
By 1616 about 1,600 colonists had been sent from England to the new world. Only 350 were still alive just a few years later. The Pilgrims themselves, when they arrived from England in 1620, had 101 passengers and 48 crew, 56 adults, of which 14 were servants. There were 31 children. In the dangerous passage to the new world, only one died and two were born. It took 65 days to arrive. However, their good fortune ended there. They went through their first winter in America and lost half of their company. (Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, vol. I., 147-148, 185).
The Pilgrims attempted collective farming. The whole community decided when and how much to plant, when to harvest and who would do the work. Gov. William Bradford wrote in his diary that he thought that taking away property and bringing it into a commonwealth would make the Pilgrims “happy and flourishing.” It did not. Soon, there was not enough food. “No supply was heard of,” wrote Bradford, “neither knew they when they might expect any.” The problem, Bradford realized, was that no one wanted to work. Everyone relied on others to do the work. Some people pretended to be injured. Others stole food. The communal system, Bradford wrote, “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment.” Young men complained they had to “spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” Strong men thought it was an “injustice” they had to do more than weaker men, without more compensation. Older men thought that working as much as young men was “indignity and disrespect.” Women who cooked and cleaned “deemed it a kind of slavery.” The Pilgrims had run into the “tragedy of the commons.” No individual Pilgrim owned crops he grew, so no individual had much incentive to work.
Bradford’s solution: private property. He assigned every family a parcel of land so they could grow their own corn. “It made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been,” he wrote. People who had claimed that “weakness and inability” made them unable to work now were eager to work. “Women now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to set corn,” wrote Bradford. The Pilgrims learned an important lesson about private property.
The change to private property worked well enough that they had a good harvest. William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, issued a decree in 1623 establishing Thursday, the third year of the Pilgrims being in America, as the time of Thanksgiving.
His decree in 1623, stated:
Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as He has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience; now, I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims, with your wives and little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the hours of 9 and 12 in the day time, on Thursday, November ye 29th, of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and twenty-three, and the third year since ye Pilgrims landed on ye Pilgrim Rock, there to listen to ye pastor, and render thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all His blessings.
What struck me about all of this is that these people went through such pain and hardship yet were still able to give thanksgiving to God. We are still carrying through on this tradition begun so long ago. Even though they were facing a hard winter in a strange place, the Pilgrims set aside time to give thanks to God for His provision in a strange new land. Their attitude was key to their happiness. In modern America, and across much of the modern developed world, we do not give thanks in the way the Pilgrims did, even on Thanksgiving. How many of us live in a spirit of gratitude, with humble appreciation for the many blessings God has given us, and how many of us dwell on the perceived shortcomings in our lives? How many of us, like Martha in the famous Bible story, stress ourselves to the max striving for the perfect home and the perfect meal to the point that we completely lose sight of the reason we have gathered to celebrate in the first place?
Such frenzied spirits did not plague the pilgrims, and for that reason they were able to give thanks joyfully despite the many uncertainties in the road ahead.
George Washington proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving in 1789, although some opposed it. There was discord among the colonies, many feeling the hardships of a few Pilgrims did not warrant a national holiday. And later, President Thomas Jefferson scoffed at the idea of having a day of thanksgiving.
New England statesman Daniel Webster, whose Plymouth Oration of 1820—delivered on “Forefathers Day”—was one of the most important steps in turning the New England story into a national story. Webster’s speech was both deeply conservative and “progressive” at the same time. He explained how the Pilgrim forefathers laid down the foundation, the building blocks of what would become a country attached to both self-government and religious liberty. The Pilgrim experience of fleeing religious repression and inaugurating their newly founded community in the New World with a simple, 200-word Mayflower Compact affirming the rule of law set in motion the inertia for a people rooted in but diverging from their European origins. However, Webster’s speech was not merely a celebration of the past. He called on his generation and the generations to come to perpetuate and extend what we had been given: the great gift of free government. He mixed the speech with a general, genuine, and unquestionable love of country, with a specific demand for what the country need to change —specifying the abominable institution of slavery.
It was Sarah Josepha Hale, a magazine editor, whose efforts eventually led to what we recognize as Thanksgiving. Hale wrote many editorials championing her cause in her Boston Ladies' Magazine, and later, in Godey's Lady's Book. Finally, after Hale's 40-year campaign of writing editorials and letters to governors and presidents, her obsession became a reality when, in 1863, President Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November as a National Day of Thanksgiving. This thanks is not to be self-aggrandizing, a subtle pat on the back that we have done so well for ourselves. Aware of the perennial temptation to, like the Pharisee in Luke’s Gospel, disguise boasting as gratitude, Abraham Lincoln modeled the humility necessary to genuinely give thanks. In the middle of the Civil War, a time when blessings must have seemed hard to come by, Lincoln not only found many to count, but also reminded the American people how unearned they were:
No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
He thus recommended penance in addition to prayer, urging citizens to “humble themselves in the dust.”
Every president after Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving. It designates a time for all to “cease from their daily work” and give thanks for their “many and great blessings,” as Theodore Roosevelt remarked in his 1908 Thanksgiving Day proclamation. Presidents changed the date a couple of times, most recently by Franklin Roosevelt, who set it up one week to the next-to-last Thursday to create a longer Christmas shopping season. Public uproar against this decision caused the president to move Thanksgiving back to its original date two years later. And in 1941, Congress finally sanctioned Thanksgiving as a legal holiday, as the fourth Thursday in November.
In a reference to the story of Jesus involving the healing of ten lepers, and the one who returns to give Jesus thanks (Luke 17:11-19), Desmond Tutu remarked that to be unthankful and unappreciative is to be diseased. We are to let our requests be known to God “in everything by prayer with thanksgiving” and then the peace of God that passes all understanding will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:6-7). Contentment and security are not simply a material accomplishment but a spiritual perspective that trusts that the present and future are in the hands of God. Circumstances vary, but God remains constant.
We so often lack gratitude because we cannot give. To thank is to give; to be gracious means to share. Egotistical people enjoy receiving and keep that enjoyment within. They forget that others might have had something to do with their pleasure. Such people are ungrateful because they do not like to acknowledge their debt to others. Gratitude is that acknowledgment. Gratitude gives away itself, like a joyful echo. Ingratitude is the inability to give back a little of the joy that one received or experienced. Gratitude is a gift, it is sharing, it is love, when the cause is another person’s generosity, courage, or love. Gratitude sees in the other the source of its joy. Therefore, ingratitude is dishonorable, and why gratitude touches deeper into our lives and character than we imagine.
Gratitude rejoices in what has taken place or in what is. People regret the life they hoped to live or the life they did not live. They miss the past as well as the future. Grateful people delight in having lived. Gratitude is this joy and love of what has taken place and in the gifts we enjoy now. Not even death can take from us what we have lived.
When we deny our design and reject our purpose, however (as we moderns have done), all we are left with is the spirit of discontentment and envy that Madison Avenue profits from. When we fall prey to the myth that we find the good life in the abundance of our possessions, we are setting ourselves up for perpetual disappointment.
That temptation to rush from one desire to the next is nothing new. It is rooted in the nature of humanity, for whom “change in all things is sweet,” as Aristotle, quoting Euripides, wrote in the “Nicomachean Ethics.” Aristotle attributed our attraction to novelty for the sake of novelty—what scholars Ben and Jenna Storey call our “restless love of change”—to “certain defective condition” of humanity. That is, humans are incomplete, or mortal. And though we are aware of our mortality, it is painful to think about. So, we distract ourselves and resist reflection, since doing so may require acknowledging our dependence on others’ endeavors, even as we recognize the vanity of some of our own. Hence, Aristotle also noted that most people are forgetful of the benefits we have received. We would prefer to focus on the good things we have done for ourselves and others, since this reassures us of our self-sufficiency. Aristotle even pointed out that benefactors love their beneficiaries more than their beneficiaries love them. Gratitude is appropriate, but pride gets in the way.
In some cases, we go as far as to dwell on the harm that has been done to us rather than contemplate the good, since this, too, can give us a sense of pride in overcoming obstacles and beating the odds. But, as Aristotle recognized, though justice does involve remedying harms suffered, it also demands gratitude for the good, and, given our forgetfulness of the good things done for us, we need reminders. Aristotle’s example of such encouragement is illustrative: “Hence, people place a shrine to the Graces in the roadway,” he explained, to foster gratitude and reciprocal giving.
Psychotherapist John Sandel notes: "I think when we recognize that we are being given a gift, we feel joy, and gratitude is the experience that flows from this joy." We expect a life of ease and comfort. We have lost the sense that each day on this earth is a wonderful gift.
As all turkey-loving Americans know, Thanksgiving entails not only “solemn praise and thanksgiving” but, just as importantly, joyful conviviality, as Amy and Leon Kass’ brief history of the holiday captures. From the Pilgrims’ famous feast with Native Americans to the 20th-century introduction of Thanksgiving Day parades, our tradition has been marked by both humble contemplation of unearned grace and festive celebration of all we have been given. Both elements remind us to cherish the time we have now, resisting the urge to look ahead in anticipation of future gifts. We should always strive to live in this way—present to the timebound world around us rather than missing it in the frantic and sometimes futile habits that characterize modern life. Nonetheless, there is wisdom in the American tradition of carving out a specific time for gratitude, halting us in our race to Christmas, and, hopefully, slowing our pace thereafter, so our hearts will be ready for the next season when it comes.
As we conclude this year's Thanksgiving celebration, we should all take a step back from the frenzy and chaos of the holiday season to meditate on the blessings that will last for eternity.
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