Thanksgiving Is Meant For The Bad Times As Much As The Good

Gratitude is a virtue. It’s moral and it’s healthy. Thanksgiving is a day to practice this virtue, rendering the efforts to rebrand the holiday an attack on thankfulness itself. In times of war and times of peace, there is always reason for pain. That we have a holiday dedicated to gratitude does not invalidate any of these reasons. It soothes our pains but does not dismiss them.

Indeed, President Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in the midst of the Civil War, making this very argument explicitly in his proclamation. Thanksgiving has always been about pausing in bad times to give thanks for the good.

“In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity … peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict,” Lincoln wrote. The first two sentences of his Thanksgiving proclamation make note of “bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come.”

The first Thanksgiving itself celebrated not merely a bountiful harvest, but a bountiful harvest enjoyed amidst suffering and scarcity. “For the English, [the first Thanksgiving] was also celebrating the fact that they had survived their first year here in New England,” Tom Begley of Plimoth Plantation told the History Channel.