Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 25, 1993 TAG: 9311240102
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: Christmas is always on the 25th of December, Valentine's Day is always on the 14th of February and the Fourth of July is always on the 4th of July. So why can't Thanksgiving just pick a day and stop roving up and down the calendar?
We have no problem with Labor Day being on a Monday every year. As anyone with historical understanding of the labor movement knows, Labor Day is specifically in honor of the working person's inalienable right to stay home on a Monday in early September. Easter also roams, but at least Easter is determined by a complex astronomical calculation (it's the first Sunday after Good Friday, which is the first Friday after Palm Sunday).
But why is Thanksgiving on a Thursday, one of the silliest days of the week? And finally, why is it in late November even though the fall harvest is weeks or even months earlier?
The answer revolves around fish, says James Baker, historian at Plimoth Plantation, a museum in Plymouth, Mass. There were "fish days" back then. A fish day was a day when you couldn't eat meat. Elizabeth I, who was Queen of England an extremely long time ago, wanted to bolster the fishing industry in England and so decreed that people couldn't eat meat on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
The Pilgrims in Plymouth and Boston, though not bound by that old rule, were nonetheless influenced by it. They tended to fast a lot, particularly on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. But they decided to make Thursday their market day, when they'd trade their goods in town and stock up.
Thursday, you might say, became the big meat day.
So when the civic authorities declared a day of thanksgiving, it was on Thursday. Except in Connecticut. In Connecticut they had Thanksgiving on Wednesdays. The Massachusetts way of doing things won out when Thanksgiving went from being a regional holiday to a national holiday in the late 1700s.
But it wasn't always in November. The national Thanksgiving declared by the Continental Congress in 1777 was held Dec. 18. Why so close to Christmas? Because back then they had the common sense to know that Christmas didn't have any Scriptural basis (there's nothing in the Bible that suggests Dec. 25 was the day Christ was born). So Christmas didn't catch on until the 1840s or so.
The first real day of thanksgiving was in the summer of 1623, after a providential rain. What people think of as the first Thanksgiving, the famous feast with the Indians at Plymouth, was actually a three-day harvest festival in early October 1621. That's why we associate Thanksgiving with the harvest. But the harvest festival was a one-shot deal. Never repeated.
Not until 1942 did Congress fix Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November. Roosevelt had previously decreed that several Thanksgivings (or "Franksgivings" as people called them) be held the third Thursday, because he wanted to lengthen the shopping season. He'd do anything to get us out of the Depression.
Here's one last thing to consider: Before the mid-1800s, Thanksgiving was not an annual event. A "Thanksgiving" was declared only when events merited. It was not a blandly automatic holiday; you had a Thanksgiving when you were really thankful about something. Now the dang thing is shoved down our throats. Literally.
\ The Mailbag:
There still seems to be some fretting about the millennium, not just because of the usual reason (the apocalypse, the Final Judgment, the terrible hangover) but also because people aren't quite sure when to party. The night of Dec. 31, 1999? Or the night of Dec. 31, 2000?
There's no disputing when the new millennium begins: Jan. 1, 2001. That's because there wasn't a 0 year. The year 2000 is the last year of the 20th century, as surely as the number 10 is the last of the first 10 positive integers (natural numbers).
The problem is, people don't want to be losers and wait an extra year to celebrate if the rest of the world doesn't care about these numerical technicalities and decides to party the moment the big 2 pops up on the calendar.
For example, Gail S. of Washington writes, "Some friends of mine and I the other night were talking about what we would like to do to inaugurate the new millennium. Someone asked about how the last millennium was celebrated. No one knew. I feel certain you would."
Dear Gail: Our data bases don't go back to the last millennium. We can, however, report about what happened at the turn of the last century. Our presumption was that people back then were so primitive that they would go bonkers the moment 1899 ended and 1900 began, in defiance of mathematical logic.
At the Library of Congress we pulled the microfilm of newspapers from Jan. 1, 1900, and Jan. 1, 1901. What we found surprised us: The new century was celebrated the night of Dec. 31, 1900. That night, for example, City Hall in New York City was bedecked with a huge sign saying "Welcome 20th Century." The lead story in the Jan. 1, 1901, New York Times was headlined "Twentieth Century's Triumphant Entry" and began "The Century is dead; long live the Century!"
So what did people do the night of Dec. 31, 1899? Not much. The Germans, we learned, did celebrate the new century a year early, but the Germans were extreme troublemakers back then as we recall. The Pope declared that the year 1900 was a Holy Year of thanksgiving for the blessings of the 19th century (this was back at the height of the belief in "progress").
So: There is precedent for patience. Though we already feel like the 20th century has been dragging on a little too long.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB