Max Miller
History.com Picture about the first Thanksgiving meal
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Thanksgiving is a holiday that is celebrated all across America. It is an American holiday, but what people think is the true origin of Thanksgiving is often skewed and has evolved from many years of misinformation and marketing ploys. When I think about the origin of Thanksgiving and where I learned about it the first thing that comes to mind is the Thanksgiving Charlie Brown special which I watch every year with my parents ever since I was a little kid, its tradition in my house. When I was doing research I was very surprised to find how the only knowledge I had about this holiday before I started my research was from a Charlie Brown special where the origin of Thanksgiving is told in dramatic fashion through cartoon characters. While doing my research I was very interested in the true historical origin of what we know now as Thanksgiving and how it was been shaped over the years by a number of factors
Using the Charlie Brown cartoon as my reference point for all of my newfound knowledge, I discovered that a lot of what the cartoon showed was relatively accurate. So thanks, Mom and Dad for showing me a decently accurate portrayal of how Thanksgiving came to be. But as all good things marketing teams from companies were quick to jump on it and to make any profit possible. The details of Thanksgiving are often skewed through inaccurate teaching the New York Times writes about, many people are unfamiliar with the true details of the holiday. Despite me learning a lot about how the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock and the hardships that they faced along with how Squanto helped them in this new land and brought his tribe together with the Pilgrims together for a grand feast from the Charlie Brown Special, (which I was surprised to see how many people were unfamiliar with this) I was surprised to learn how Thanksgiving was not an official holiday until 1863 where President Lincoln issued the papers written up by William Seward. I was also unfamiliar with how Sarah Josepha Hale, the writer of Mary Had a Little Lamb and other pieces of work and articles was a tremendous influence on Thanksgiving finally becoming a national Holiday. She lobbied to government officials and wrote about her feelings on how Thanksgiving should be a national holiday that would unify the country. This gained support and finally it was declared a holiday.
In the early years of Thanksgiving there were many different variations of the food, the food would depend on the family and their cultural background and would differ depending on family. Now, the food that is eaten on Thanksgiving is much of the same everybody has turkey, pumpkin pie, cranberries and often some sort of alcohol which was found out from a poll thanks the Smithsonian. So how did Thanksgiving dinner go from a different cultural experience depending on the family so such a widely regarded cookie cutter meal that only differs slightly from others? Well the short answer is marketing. Starting during the 1920s ads started focusing on turkey for Thanksgiving, before that there was a wide range of bird such as duck and goose consumed at the dinner table. But marketing teams started to market items such as roasters, thermometers and cooking bags that focused on the preparation and presentation of turkey, along with ads that claimed turkey was a sacred Thanksgiving tradition (although no evidence supports that). Other companies caught on to what was happening with the turkey and advertised things like cranberries and other foods which many know now as the “traditional” Thanksgiving food. Even though pilgrims lacked many of the necessary ingredients to make the majority of the food that is being marketed as “traditional” such as pumpkin pie.
Marketing teams for food companies have all tired to state their claim that their food deserves a spot on the highly competitive dinner table on Thanksgiving, some have had great success such as Butterball Turkeys and Ocean Spray Cranberries, other companies not so much. But over the years more and more companies started to do this with more and more aggressive ad campaigns and Americans have maintained these traditions to the point where it was evolved so that a Thanksgiving dinner table is a familiar sight to many and people expect the same food despite the differences in people's culture. This went on until it finally evolved into a holiday that was being shaped not by the rituals of the pilgrims who landed on Plymouth rock but the rituals of the marketing teams trying to make a profit.
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