Millions of people will sit down to turkey, cranberry sauce, and stuffing to commemorate the celebratory dinner that took place in 1621 between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. The Pilgrims had fled religious persecution in England and endured a harsh ocean voyage on a ship called The Mayflower to land at Plymouth Rock; they were ill-prepared for winter, and most of them perished or became severely ill during their first winter. The tales of turkey and sauce and stuffing are mostly untrue; however, most likely, the autumn feast was one of seal, swan, or goose. They didn’t have pie, either, because they hadn’t yet grown wheat; the same goes for mashed potatoes.
The first Thanksgiving probably wasn’t the first celebration of mingled cultures, either. The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans often paid tribute to their gods after the fall harvest. In 1565, Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés invited members of the local Timucua tribe to a dinner in St. Augustine, Florida. In the winter of 1619, when 38 British settlers reached a site called “Berkeley Hundred” on the banks of Virginia’s James River, they gleefully read a proclamation designating the date as “a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.” And Native Americans, themselves, had a long tradition of feasting in celebration of the fall harvest long before the Pilgrims ever set foot on shore.
It wasn’t until 1863, during the Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day to be held each November. He only did that after being pestered for years by Sarah Hale, author of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” For 36 years, she’d been sending letters to governors, senators, presidents, and other politicians, pleading to establish a national holiday.
Lincoln asked all Americans to ask God to “commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife and to heal the wounds of the nation.” He declared Thanksgiving to be on the last Thursday of every November, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved it up a week in 1939 to spur retail sales during the Great Depression. Not many people liked that date. They called it “Franksgiving,” and it was later moved to the fourth Thursday in November. (from Writer’s Almanac)