Making a Celebration of Special Day’s Story

Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, an American History by Diana Karter Appelbaum (Facts on File: $9.95).

Some folks have trouble handling major holidays because of their religious or commercial overtones. It’s pretty hard, however, to knock Thanksgiving, a day speaking eloquently of America’s origins and falling on a mellow Thursday, when a “hush of contentment settles across the land.”

Diana Karter Appelbaum’s book, a frankly old-fashioned and charming potpourri, consists of generous portions of historical facts, some patriotic lore and legend, traditional poems, recipes and an excerpt from a New Yorker story about an immigrant child’s desire to have a “real” Thanksgiving.

Rightly, Appelbaum begins with the first “thanksgiving,” celebrated in the fall of 1621 by the Pilgrims, whose first year in the New World depleted their ranks from 102 to 55. Strict Puritans, theirs was a simple feast to give thanks for survival, for abundant--though alien--crops and to impress the Indians.

The menu featured venison, corn and boiled pumpkin (pies and traditional dishes requiring milk or butter were for the future, as the Mayflower carried no cows) and some stewed, bitter cranberries. Though wild turkeys were plentiful, history doesn’t report their consumption.

For many years, Thanksgiving, observed exclusively in New England, was celebrated by church services, donations to the poor and groaning-board feasts. Spreading to Eastern states, it became one of the few days of rest for newly industrialized workers. Fantasticals, where young men caroused through the streets decked out in ragtag costumes--perhaps a reminder of the British retreat from New York City in 1783--were popular until World War II.

In the 1880s, the triumph of football was seen in an annual game played between Yale and Harvard. And midway through the last century, Sarah Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, wrote “rhapsodic editorials” in favor of making the holiday a national one.

Tracing the “Thanksgiving date controversy,” the author details widely varying dates of observances, from the Continental Congress designating Oct. 18--through arbitrary dates set by the Colonies, territories and states--to President Lincoln’s declaration of the last Thursday in November. President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated Nov. 23 in response to retail merchants’ efforts to wring more pre-Christmas shopping days from the calendar, but the date dismayed football coaches, who wanted a holiday weekend for the “big game.”

Finally, a bill establishing the fourth Thursday in November was passed in 1941, making the holiday fall on the final Thursday of the month in five out of seven years.

Despite the logistics of bringing family together, excesses of preparation and emotional excitement that Thanksgiving engenders, many have come to agree with Louisiana’s former Sen. John Holmes Overton, who observed that the date doesn’t matter, “Just so they have one and tell me in time to get myself a turkey.”