Wags called it “Franksgiving.’’
That is one of the delightful tidbits that James W. Baker serves up in “Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday.’’
As former director of research at Plimouth Plantation, and a go-to guy on all things Thanksgiving, Baker knows the holiday inside and out and shares that knowledge with authority and an ear for what Peter J. Gomes, the Harvard minister who grew up in Plymouth, calls in a foreword, its “unique charm.’’
Baker traces how the celebration has changed over the years. In the 18th century, Thanksgiving was viewed as a day for family reunions, and the Pilgrims were remembered as the symbolic founders of New England. But the connection between the two had been lost by the time George Washington issued the first presidential Thanksgiving proclamation in 1789.
The problem, Baker says, was that there were few surviving copies of “Mourt’s Relation,’’ the account of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 from which we draw our modern conception of the holiday. Once one was discovered in a Philadelphia library in 1820, the tradition of Thanksgiving as a harvest celebration, complete with pumpkin and turkey, was settled.
A basic bill of fare from the 1840s sets the table not only with a roast turkey, but “a pair of chickens, stuffed, and boiled with cabbage and a piece of lean pork,’’ and a chicken pie.
By way of contrast, there is also a more modest menu from an Army Air Force unit stationed in the “Mediterranean Theater of Operations’’ in 1944 that includes the traditional turkey, along with “June Peas,’’ buttered corn, probably canned, and a pumpkin pie.
While the depiction of the first celebration in “Mourt’s Relation’’ highlights racial harmony, the popular view of the relationship between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans has been portrayed with darker overtones.
One 1895 print shows a young musket-armed Pilgrim comforting his wife outside their cabin, from which the door has been ripped off. Lying dead in the snow at their feet is an Indian.
