The Other Christmas

Pastor’s Epistle—November, A.D. 2016 C

I never used to like Thanksgiving. Sandwiched between the far more evocative holidays of Halloween and Christmas, it’s the forgotten middle sibling of our greater winter festival. As a child I never understood why we would celebrate a sanitized Pilgrim pageant, which seemed farcical even then. And as an adult I’ve long felt awkward approaching the public celebration of Thanksgiving, since here we have a state holiday masquerading as religious. But more recently, as our family has grown, I’ve come to appreciate the fourth Thursday in November for what it truly is.

Thanksgiving has something of a bizarre pedigree. In the broadest sense of the term, we’ve had thanksgivings in America for more than 500 years. The Spanish down south and the French up north celebrated the Eucharist (literally “thanksgiving”) in honor of various settlements and successes in the New World. The Continental Congress declared days of national thanksgiving long before our Constitution was drafted. And Presidents from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln designated thanksgivings as they saw fit.

But Thanksgiving as we know it now—a federal holiday since 1863—is a specific celebration based upon New England tradition. The Puritans of New England sought out a more personal and spontaneous faith than that which they found in the established Anglican Church. They did away with the ancient festivals of the Church calendar, finding them too stuffy and ritualized. Some went so far as to denounce the old Christian holidays as pagan, an accusation still regularly raised by the unlettered today.

Rather, the Puritans preferred to declare local and spontaneous days of fasting or of feasting. If they implored God for an end to a drought, say, the parish preacher might announce a day of fasting and repentance. If things had gone particularly well for the community, he might proclaim a sudden festival of thanksgiving instead. Both involved a full day’s church attendance. But the children and grandchildren of the Puritans proved victims of their own worldly success, and so lacked their forebears’ religious fervor. Thanksgivings became less spontaneous and more regular, with feasting now the norm in the prosperous New England colonies. Indeed, it seemed that every November the Puritans were now indulging in their excess with an annual feast of Thanksgiving.

This new November Thanksgiving is often called a harvest festival, but that’s not quite true. Harvest festivals tend to fall earlier, in August and September. One could expect snow on the ground by late November, as clearly evidenced in perhaps the only widely known Thanksgiving carol, “Jingle Bells.” And this points us to the true origins of our modern celebration, namely that Thanksgiving is the Puritan Christmas.

It’s not that surprising, really. Just as Halloween had been outlawed by the Puritans of Old England only to be immediately reborn as Guy Fawkes Night, so Christmas had been officially done away with in New England only to resurface under the guise of Thanksgiving. Many thematic emphases—hearth and home, food and family, warmth within the winter winds—are shared by both. Though Thanksgiving has proven impressively resistant to the rampant commercialization that has overrun the rest of the holiday season, Thanksgiving still remains, in effect, a pre-Christmas Christmas.

Yet this is no bad thing. In a society that prefers to celebrate Christmas a month early rather than savor the delicious spiritual expectancy of Advent, Thanksgiving reorients us away from all the glitz, gifts, and glamour back to the heart of our faith and our family. A warm home amidst the snows, children and grandparents gathered about the table, the simple celebration of life’s simplest joys: for these we quite rightly give thanks, as we prepare our hearts for a King.

In Jesus. Amen.