Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 November 1897 — SOMETHING ABOUT THE DAY. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

SOMETHING ABOUT THE DAY.

The Thanksgiving Festival Was Long of a Peripatetic Nature.

FWfl HANK SGI V ING j»a till as late as IGBO, Kj nearly sixty years after its idea was C” I'l first suggested, was pAK - eminently a movable \ feast, liable to occur a at any time from January to December and in any place throughout the colonies, wherever the J various inhabitants

| felt gratitude to be a becoming emotion. > Instead, too, of a general expression of thanks, as is now the custom, they rendered up thanks in detail—on one occasion it would be in return for much-need-ed rain, then for triumph over the Indians and again for the safe landing of the English supply ships. One time, indeed, in July, 1021, when rain finally came after a prolonged period of drought and prayer, they appointed a-thanksgiving, of one week in duration. Were such a peripatetic Thanksgiving to come in vogue again it would be quite a shock to us of this generation, with our pre-established notions of Thanksgiving as inseparable from roast turkey, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. Fancy sitting down to our Thanksgiving dinner in April when we might esteem ourselves lucky if we were furnished with asparagus as a delicacy and rhubarb pie as a dessert, for if we had been pilgrims or even Massachusetts Bay colonists we. would have been obliged to choose between 'taking what the soil produced or going without, these present happy days of a whole Florida garden being landed by express at our doors in midwinter not being yet on the American program. Or imagine the Thanksgiving dinner of July, 1621, partaken of perhaps to the delightful accompaniment of the patter of the rain for which they had so fervently prayed and with green corn as the piece de resistance, or that Thanksgiving in June, 1637, after victory over the Pequods, when maybe strawberries garnished with roses formed the menu. On these occasions, though, the colonists had evidently quite lost sight of the part that the autumn harvest plays in the observance—the prehistoric significance of the festival, the season being with them purely and simply a many-voiced thankoffering in acknowledgment of the bettering of their condition. After it became an annual affair it supplanted in a measure the English Christmas, whose celebration was too riotous to meet their strict religious notions—this the puritanic Thanksgiving. supplying the unalloyed devoutness which was the one thing they would willingly have retained in the Christmas of their forefathers.

As has been seen Thanksgiving day for the first sixty years of its existence was, a hit-and-miss affair as to time and place, and even after it had settled down into an annual autumn festival if the people did not feels particularly encouraged the observance of it was liable to be omitted, and it did not assume its national character till during the revolution, when Congress recommended the yearly appointing of such a day. In spite of this, though, in the years intervening between 1784 and 1789 there were no Thanksgiving days. In 1789 Washington issued a Thanksgiving proclamation in view of the adoption of the Constitution and after that to the time of Lincoln, the example of the first President was intermittently followed by bis successors. But only since 1858 can Thanksgiving be said to have been a fixed and universal American custom, and in that year the Governors of the different Southern States united with their Eastern brother officials in issuing Thanksgiving proclamations, and the example set by Lincoln in 1863 of issuing a Thanksgiving proclamation suggesting the last Thursday in November as an appropriate day has been followed since without break by every occupant of the presidential chair. Though long in coming to its fulfillment,

like some fair oak tree that requires many years of storm and sun to bring it to ita full beauty, Thanksgiving, the Sunday of our national year, is now an imperishable monument of the faith, the benevolence and the softer graces so often averred to have no existence in this practical work-a-day American world.