The history of Thanksgiving

Reed Thurman

Thanksgiving is a holiday that everyone loves, it is a time to spend time with your family and to eat lots of delicious food. Although everyone loves this holiday it has been drastically changed over the years. Our modern tradition and story of Thanksgiving has been changed and shaped from the original celebration threw marketing and the use of school textbooks.

Everyone knows the classic meals for thanksgiving include: turkey, cranberry sauce, mac and cheese, green beans, and pies. But almost none of these classic foods were served at what people call the first Thanksgiving. While there was documentation of wild turkeys in the area, where the first thanksgiving was held, there is no documentation that turkey was served at the first thanksgiving. There were also no pies served because they lacked ovens to cook pies. The reason that so many of these dishes are so popular today is because of marketing. Adds that people saw marketed for things such as turkeys and cranberry sauce, and not for some of the original items that were served at what people call the first Thanksgiving.

Everybody was taught that the first Thanksgiving was at Plimoth, where the pilgrims invited the native people of that area who helped them grow their crops for a festival to celebrate the good harvest. While some of this is true there are major aspects of it that are false. There was a festival to celebrate the good harvest that they had but there is no evidence that the native people were invited, it is unknown why the natives were there but there is no evidence that they were invited. This was not the first thanksgiving as well, Native Americans and Europeans had been having festivals to celebrate a good harvest for centuries. This event also wasn’t called the first Thanksgiving until the 1830's. Textbooks teach that Squanto was a Native American who helped the Pilgrims by showing them the best ways the plant corn and the best places to fish, while this is true it doesn’t show the entirety of Squanto’s life. He was sold into slavery in 1611 and was shipped to Spain and then England where he learned to speak English. He then returned to New England to find his entire tribe had died from smallpox. He then met the Pilgrims and helped them.



Both of these examples show that our modern tradition and story of Thanksgiving has been changed and shaped from the original celebration threw marketing and the use of school textbooks. While there is some truth in textbooks about how the holiday began, most of the facts about it are overly simplified or are just wrong.


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