By MARSHA MERCER
A friend tells me she’s still very sad. The election was a “slap
in the face of decency,” and she can’t forgive her sisters and their husbands for
voting for Donald Trump.
Another friend has trouble sleeping. A third said she’s
stuck in election denial.
“It cannot be as bad as we can imagine,” she wrote in an
email, adding, “Yes it is.”
Nearly 62 million Hillary Clinton voters are as gloomy as
the nearly 61 million Trump voters are jubilant.
Into this maelstrom of emotions comes the holiday devoted to
carbs, calories – and gratitude. What -- now?
Yes, bring on Thanksgiving. We have rarely needed it more.
We can’t always agree about politics, and shouldn’t. But we
can use the pause in our daily routines to gather together, give thanks for
what we have and share love with family and friends.
We’ve been giving thanks since before we had a president or
a country. Massachusetts and Virginia still squabble over where the first
Thanksgiving occurred. The Pilgrims’ celebration of the harvest and survival
with about 90 Wampanoag Indians was in 1621, two years after Virginia colonists
marked their safe arrival with a day of prayerful thanksgiving.
In 1789, George Washington signed a proclamation declaring a
day of “public thanksgiving and prayer” for the new government. Other
presidents followed, with a few interruptions. Thomas Jefferson refused to
issue a Thanksgiving proclamation because he saw it as a conflict of church and
state.
It took a decades-long crusade by Sarah Josepha Hale, editor
of Godey’s Lady’s Book, to bring the national holiday into being. She wrote her
first editorial on the subject in 1837.
Thanksgiving “might, without inconvenience, be observed on
the same day of November, say the last Thursday in the month, throughout all
New England; and also in our sister states, who have grafted it upon their
social system. It would then have a national character, which would,
eventually, induce all the states to join in the commemoration of `Ingathering,’”
she wrote.
With foresight, she added: “It is a festival which will
never become obsolete, for it cherishes the best affections of the heart – the
social and domestic ties.”
After many more editorials and through Hale’s persistent appeals,
more than 30 states and territories had Thanksgiving on their calendars by the
1850s.
Because Hale never gave up, our national Thanksgiving
holiday was created at a time even more divisive than ours. She finally
persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to issue a proclamation in October 1863, as
the Civil War raged.
Lincoln put out a call to “fellow-citizens in every part of
the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning
in foreign lands to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as
a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the
Heavens.”
Secretary of State William H. Seward,
not Lincoln, actually wrote the proclamation, although Lincoln signed it.
Seward’s original manuscript was sold a year later to raise money for Union
troops, according to Abraham Lincoln Online.
The holiday was celebrated on the last Thursday of November
by tradition – until President Franklin D. Roosevelt thought he’d boost retail
sales by moving Thanksgiving up a week in 1939, from Nov. 30 to Nov. 23. An
uproar ensued, and some states celebrated two Thanksgivings. Two years later
Congress set Thanksgiving in law as the fourth Thursday.
Today we know that practicing gratitude – and not just on
Thanksgiving -- is good for us. Hundreds of academic studies have found physical,
psychological and social benefits in gratitude – from lower blood pressure to
less loneliness to more optimism.
Gratitude is “an affirmation of goodness. We affirm that
there are good things in the world, gifts and benefits we’ve received,” Robert
A. Emmons, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, wrote
in an essay for Greater Good, a University of California, Berkeley, website.
Emmons, a leading authority in the study of gratitude, said by
practicing gratitude, “we recognize that the sources of this goodness are
outside of ourselves.”
Some things haven’t changed in 400 years. Happy
Thanksgiving.
©2016 Marsha Mercer
30
No comments:
Post a Comment