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The Origins of Thanksgiving
The North American Thanksgiving celebration stems from the European Harvest Festival. This in turn had its roots in the corn culture.*
Long before recorded history people have been celebrating the Fall Harvest. For thousands of years a community had only the food it could produce itself and the success or failure of the harvest was a matter of life or death. There are many harvest beliefs that are universal.
There was a strong belief that the rhythms of the growing season were related to those of human life. Crops were "born" from under the ground and "died" in the harvest. The fact that they grew from underground, which many ancient people regarded as the home of the dead, suggested to them that the crops must contain spirits. People believed that at the time of the harvest these spirits must be either pacified or destroyed, or they would take revenge against the farmers who harvested them. Before there were formal religions, people prayed to the spirits of their crops and to the spirits of the rain and sun on which their crops depended. And even after the major religions were established, many people continued to practice the rituals of the harvest.
Belief in a crop spirit has been found among the natives of the Americas, among the farmers in the rice paddies in Asia, among the Europeans and among the Egyptians. On the fertile land on the sides of the Nile, Egyptians farmers used to weep and pretend to be grief stricken so as to deceive a spirit. They feared that the spirit would be angry with them for cutting the corn in which it lived.
Many corn cultures believed that the reaper who cut the last sheaf removed the only remaining hiding place for the corn spirit, which meant that the corn spirit would then hide in the reaper. Since the corn spirit had to be killed, this person became a human sacrifice. The death of the reaper - and the spirit - was necessary to promote the next growth of crops. In some places the bodies were cut up and buried in corn fields or burnt and ashes thrown over the corn field. It is interesting to note that this grisly tradition did indeed promote the crops. As any gardener will tell you, blood, bones and ashes make great fertilizers. The evolution of this tradition put an end to human sacrifice; instead, the corn spirit was caught in the last sheaf and the sheaf was made into a doll. This corn-doll was hung in the farmhouse until the next year crops when it was burnt and the ashes plowed back into the land. And eventually, this festival became a thanksgiving harvest to thank the gods or God for the bountiful harvest to get the community through the winter. The ancient fear of the corn spirit persisted throughout the Middle Ages.
Canadian Thanksgiving Day
In 1879, the Canadian Parliament declared November 6th a day of Thanksgiving and a national holiday. Over the years, the date changed, and finally, on January 31st, 1957, Parliament proclaimed that Thanksgiving is to be observed on the second Monday in October. Americans celebrate Thanksgiving by remembering the Pilgrims and the first settlers in the New World, on the fourth Thursday in November while Canadians give thanks for a successful harvest. The harvest season falls earlier in Canada compared to the United States due to the simple fact that Canada is further north.
The Origins of the Turkey
Ten million years ago meleagris gallopayo or turkeys were roaming the Americas. The turkey was originally native to Southern Ontario, parts of the United States and nearly all of Mexico. The ancient Mayan people celebrated their harvest with a turkey-and-squash feast and we know that the turkey was first tamed by the Aztec peoples of southern Mexico before the Europeans arrived. Turkeys were taken to Spain about 1519 and eventually distributed over all of Europe. Some of the early colonists took these birds back to North America to use as breeding stock with native wild turkeys. Turkeys are highly nutritious and low in calories. Protein rich, it has high concentrations of the B vitamins, niacin, and riboflavin and well as valuable amounts of calcium, iron, vitamin A and vitamin C. No two etymologists agree on the origin of the name "Turkey". Columbus thought the New World was connected to India and that the turkeys were related to peacocks, so he named them "Tuka" which is peacock in the Tamil language of India. Another theory is that when the bird was introduced to Spain, the Spanish Jews called it "Tukki" for the Hebrew word for peacock. It could also have come from the native North American word "firkee" which was corrupted to turkey or it could have come from the bird's alarm call: "turc turc". Most probably the word came from Turkish traders selling to the English. The turkey is related to the pheasant and contrary to popular belief, the turkey is very cautious and smart. The largest individual hatchery operation in North America is located at Strathroy, Ontario.
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*Corn in the European sense means the various cereal plants such as wheat, oats, barely or rye. In North America, corn is known as maize. |