Plum Pudding, Mincemeat and Turkey HOLIDAYS OF THE PAST AT SEA AND ASHORE
“Y
ankees don’t keep Christmas,
and ship masters at sea never know when Thanksgiving comes so Jack has no festival at all,” wrote Richard Henry Dana in 1831, in Two Years Before the Mast. This dreary situation was on the verge of change even as Dana penned these words. Merely eight years before, Clement Clarke Moore wrote a poem entitled “A Visit from St. Nicholas” and in the following decade Godey’s Lady’s Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale began her campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday celebrated reliably on the last Thursday of the month.
Most Yankees did not celebrate Christmas in the early 1800s. A holdover from the Puritan days when extravagant and biblically non-warranted holiday observance was eschewed, Christmas was kept in New England only by Catholics and Episcopalians and by the descendants of the Dutch in nearby New York. New Englanders who were not at all averse to having a good time did, however, enthusiastically celebrate Thanksgiving as they had for over a century already, particularly Connecticut people, who had the most consistent record of declaring an annual autumnal harvest festival. During most of the 1700s, Thanksgiving floated from late November to early December, usually held on a Thursday, declared
by
SANDRA OLIVER