Last year, James wrote a brief history of Thanksgiving for the Guardian US. Our national holiday has less to do with the Pilgrims (shown above landing on Plymouth Rock in December 1620) and more with northern abolitionism and a writer named Sarah Josepha Hale, who launched the celebration we know it today.
Not everyone was on board. As James writes in the piece, one critic complained that "Thanksgiving was an attempt to replace the 'legitimate Christian holiday' of Christmas with a secular day where 'an astonishing quantity of execrable liquor will be guzzled.'"
Here's hoping that you guzzle an astonishing quantity of the beverage of your choice today while remembering Hale's call for this to be a charitable day of “benevolence of action” and that “every American home” should be a “place of plenty and of rejoicing."
Read the full story at The Guardian's website and feel free to share with your friends and family.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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