Thanksgiving Day, p. 3

Thanksgiving Day, p. 3

"New Year’s Day we share with all the world, and Christmas and Easter will all Christendom. The Fourth of July is emphatically our own day, but it is purely patriotic in its significance. Thanksgiving Day is as distinctively American as the Nation’s birthday is and it is sacred to the two strongest forces in American life.
There are plenty of people abroad, and some at home, who do not believe that our people are eminent for religion or domesticity. But they are. And one evidence of it is this very day of annual observance. It may be quite true that a great part of the population does not go to church on the last Thursday of November, and it is evident that much of the day is devoted to football and other outdoor sports. But the day was never a fast day; quite the contrary; in its primitive form and its New England surroundings it was a feast day, so far, at least as the supplies of food permitted. It was a day of public worship and thanksgiving to God, but even the New Englander did not go to church all day; be devoted no inconsiderable share of it to hearty eating.
Religion has always been a great power in American society- a fact sometimes lost sight of in the multiplicity of religious bodies; it is sometimes supposed that mere denominational partisanship takes the place of real, deep religious feeling. This is not so. No people in the world are more strongly moved by religious feeling in distinction from religious ceremonial and religious habits, and to no people is it more natural to give thanks to God for national and individual blessings. Some Englishmen come over here, glance at our family hotels and our apartment houses and go back to their own country with the story that there is no home life in America. Is is as great a mistake as we Americans make when we imagine the French to be without domesticity because their vocabulary has no precise equivalent for our word “home.” The truth is that domesticity is a human and not a national feeling, and if we have no right to claim preeminence and its possession, we are at least justified in claiming to be inferior to no other nation in our love of home and in the strength of our family ties.
Thanksgiving Day originated in New England at a time when the colonists had little to give thanks for except that they were still alive. Its observance became national about the time of the Civil War, because that intensified our national feeling, and its result gave us occasion for profound thankfulness. Because it is a day devoted to the recognition of man’s dependence upon his Creator, and to reunions of families, it has appealed strongly to fundamental American instincts, and has established itself East and West, North and South.
The American people have at this time abundant reason for thankfulness in the continuance of peace; in the abundant harvests, and in the absence of epidemics and calamities. Much as there is to condemn in business and politics, and frequent as are private scandals, we believe that American progress is not limited to the acquisition of wealth, but that the standards of public and private life are slowly advancing; that public spirit and generosity are growing virtues; that domestic virtues were never more esteemed, and that the American people as a whole will be entirely sincere to-day both when they- or a good many of them- assemble in their churches to give thanks to God, and also when around their well loaded dinner tables they renew their expressions of family affection.
American wealth is taking over holidays and the season of the holidays. Not all holidays are revolved around culture or family - they revolve around wealth. American holidays need to go back to being about the morals and core values of the holiday."

N/A

Savannah Tribune

1909-11-20