I am a member of the committee of the Hertfordshire branch of the English-Speaking Union. Through our exchange programmes we have a close relationship with the USA and so every year we commemorate Thanksgiving with a traditional lunch in a private room in a convenient pub. Due to diary conflicts we held it this week, that is a week late, but nevertheless we celebrated in the usual way. The highlight was a talk by Mrs Amber Waite, Headmistress of St Albans High School for Girls. Amber has a very interesting background as she was born in Dallas, Texas to a Jewish family of German origin. But her parents were most anxious that she and her brother were not treated as in some way out of the ordinary and so they entered into all the usual seasonal traditions of Thanksgiving and Christmas. There might have been a Hannukah look to the Christmas tree, but it was still a Christmas tree.

Amber told us a great deal about the history of Thanksgiving, and I have chosen to blog on that this week as I for one learned quite a lot. Frankly the history is somewhat complicated and perhaps a degree of mythology has crept into some of it. In September 1620 a small ship called the Mayflower left Plymouth, England with 102 passengers on board. The majority of these are referred to as Pilgrims but actually they were Protestants who believed that the church in England was not capable of reform and so instead sought a new home where they could freely practice their faith. This is in contrast to the Puritans who while sharing more or less the same faith wanted to reform the English church from within. Of course, in the end they largely succeeded in doing so. Not all the passengers were looking for religious freedom. Several were instead attracted by the promise of prosperity and land ownership in the New World.

The crossing was both dangerous and uncomfortable. After 66 days they reached Cape Cod someway north of their intended destination, the mouth of the Hudson River. A month later the Mayflower crossed Massachusetts Bay where they began the work of establishing a village at Plymouth. But they lacked some of the basic skills of agriculture and carpentry and building and during the first terrible winter most of them remained on board the ship. Closely confined they suffered from scurvy and outbreaks of disease and only half of the original passengers and crew survived the winter. In the spring the survivors went ashore and were astonished by a visit from a member of the Abenaki tribe who greeted them in English.

Some days later he returned with another Native American, Squanto, who had been kidnapped by an English sea captain, sold into slavery before escaping to London and returning to his homeland on an exploratory expedition. Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to grow maize, catch fish in the rivers and avoid poisonous plants. He also helped them forge an alliance with another local tribe, the Wampanoag, which lasted for over 50 years and remains one of the few examples of genuine harmony between English colonists and Native Americans.

After the first corn harvest was proved successful the newly established Governor William Bradford organised a feast in November 1621 even inviting some of the Native American allies including the chief Massasoit. This event is now remembered as Americans’ first Thanksgiving although probably that term was not used at the time. The menu to modern eyes seems quite exotic including lobster, seal, foul, swans, and a few deer. It’s been suggested that these dishes were probably prepared using traditional Native American spices and cooking methods. Pilgrims did not even have any ovens and had to be shown how to cook these foods over an open fire.

The following year there was a long drought that threatened the year’s harvest and so it wasn’t until 1623 that the second celebration was held but this time it was more of a religious fast than a feast. Over the next decades the practice of holding Thanksgiving was somewhat inconsistent and localised but during the American Revolution the Continental Congress determined one or more days of Thanksgiving a year. In 1789 the new president George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation by the national government of the United States. But this was Thanksgiving for the successful conclusion to the country’s war of independence and ratification of the US constitution rather than any link to a religious festival.

His successors John Adams and James Madison followed his example but then Thomas Jefferson took a different view. He felt that Man’s relationship with God was personal and was not something in which the state should intervene. In 1817 New York became the first of several northern states to adopt an annual Thanksgiving holiday although they were all celebrated on different dates. In the south below the Mason-Dixon line they did not follow this tradition. For many years the famous writer Sarah Josepha Hale, who among many other things wrote the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” launched a campaign to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. For 36 years she wrote numerous editorials and sent dozens of letters to politicians making the case.

At the height of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln made a proclamation in 1863 entreating all Americans to ask God to “commend his tender care to all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife” and to “heal the wounds of the nation.” He designated the final Thursday in November as the date of Thanksgiving and that was followed every year until 1939 when Franklin D Roosevelt, taking advantage that there were five Thursdays in that month, pushed it up a week in an endeavour to stimulate pre-Christmas sales following the Great Depression. This concept was not well received and indeed was known as Franksgiving and 1941 he reluctantly signed a bill making Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November which it remains.

For many Americans the Thanksgiving celebration has lost much of its original religious significance and has become primarily a sumptuous feast with family and friends. According to the National Turkey Federation 90% of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day.  The day is also celebrated by a number of parades. The largest has been going since 1924 when it was first presented by Macy’s department store in New York City. The day is also marked by numerous American Football matches involving both College and Pro football teams.

Not everyone agrees that the feast in Plymouth was actually the first Thanksgiving in the United States. As early as 1565 the Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilé invited members of the local Timucua tribe to dinner in St Augustine, Florida after holding a mass to thank God for his crew’s safe arrival. The year before Mayflower’s epic voyage 38 British settlers reached the site called Berkeley Hundred by Virginia’s James River and read the proclamation designating the date as “a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

Indeed, most Americans are proud of their Thanksgiving tradition and rightly so. The Canadians have a similar festival with similar history and indeed the concept of Thanksgiving spans many cultures, continents and indeed passages of time. The Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans all feasted and paid tribute to the gods after the Autumn harvest and there is a similar celebration in ancient Jewish tradition called Sukkot. Long before Europeans set foot on American shores Native Americans had their own rich tradition of commemorating the Autumn harvest with feasting and merrymaking.

Amber concluded her talk by saying that Thanksgiving also signals the beginning of the Christmas season. It is clear and unlike the UK where my local town was putting up its decorations in mid-November the US has this definite starting point. She thinks we could learn from them. But then I also think we’ve learnt the wrong lesson from them which is the adoption of Black Friday.

Again, there is more mythology involved. Many people tell a story behind the Thanksgiving shopping-related Black Friday tradition that after an entire year of operating at a loss (“in the red”) stores would supposedly earn a profit (“went into the black”) on the day after Thanksgiving, because holiday shoppers started getting in the Christmas mood and bought mountains of discounted merchandise. Retail companies do record losses in red and profits in black when doing the accounting but the actual time when they move into the black will vary hugely and this version of Black Friday’s origin may be officially sanctioned but is wholly inaccurate.

Back in the 1950s, police in the city of Philadelphia used the term Black Friday to describe the chaos that ensued on the day after Thanksgiving, when hordes of suburban shoppers and tourists flooded into the city in advance of the big Army-Navy football game held on that Saturday every year. While most Americans would take the day off Philadelphia police could not do so and instead had to work extra-long shifts dealing with the additional crowds and traffic. Shoplifters also took advantage of the bedlam in stores and made off with merchandise, adding to the law-enforcement headache.

By 1961 the name Black Friday had caught on: the city’s merchants tried unsuccessfully to change it to Big Friday in order to remove the negative connotations. The term didn’t really spread to the rest the country until much later. As recently as 1985 it wasn’t in common use nationwide but then retailers found a way to reinvent Black Friday and turn it into something that seemed to reflect positively rather than negatively on them and their customers. That story has stuck and and indeed has spread as other retail holidays have been created.

But the final word should go to Which, the Consumer Association magazine, which reports every year that few of the so-called discounted offers on Black Friday are actually any better than offers made during the previous 12 months and quite often worse.