Giving Thanks Through the Centuries: "Shades of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians sit at every American's Thanksgiving table, along with those of [George] Washington, [Abraham] Lincoln, [Sarah Josepha] Hale, and others who have enriched our Thanksgiving tradition and helped to knit us together as a nation.".

• Author: Kirkpatrick, Melanie
• Position: AMERICAN THOUGHT

ONE FOURTH OF JULY in the 1980s, when I was living in Hong Kong, I read a tidbit in a local newspaper about America's Independence Day. Across the U.S. today, the columnist declared, families are celebrating the birth of their nation by sitting down to turkey dinners with all the trimmings.

The expatriate American community in what then was a British colony shared a chuckle over the columnist's confusion about the U.S.'s national holidays, but it also set me to thinking: in some sense, the error was a natural one. A non-American could be forgiven for conflating these two homegrown U.S. holidays. Both bind celebrants to the larger history of our nation.

Thanksgiving is not a patriotic holiday per se, but it is full of patriotic feeling as Americans give thanks for our shared blessings as a nation. The best expression of this aspect of Thanksgiving comes from Benjamin Franklin, who called it a day "of public Felicity," a time to express gratitude to God for the "full Enjoyment of Liberty, civil and religious."

Just about every country has a national day--a holiday when citizens stop to honor their constitution or celebrate a monarch's birthday or recall their day of liberation from colonial rule. The U.S. is not unique in celebrating its Independence Day, but Thanksgiving is something else. Only a few other countries set aside a day of thanksgiving. Most of these are harvest festivals, celebrations that trace their origins back to when life beat to the rhythm of the agricultural cycle.

America's Thanksgiving holiday is something different. We live in a less-religious age than did the Pilgrims, but it would be a mistake to claim, as some do, that Thanksgiving is not religious. It is that rarest of religious holidays, one that all religions can celebrate. The Pilgrims came to our shores seeking freedom to worship as they pleased. On Thanksgiving, Americans of all faiths--and of none --can give thanks that they found it.

Thanksgiving has grown up with the country. Many of our greatest historical figures are associated with it: George Washington, who proclaimed our first national Thanksgiving amid controversy over his constitutional power to do so--and who included in his proclamation Americans of every faith; Abraham Lincoln, who wanted to heal a war-torn nation when he called for all Americans, North and South, to mark the same day of Thanksgiving; and Franklin Roosevelt, who set off a national debate when he changed the holiday's traditional date.

Ordinary Americans played their part, too: Sarah Josepha Hale, the 19th-century magazine editor who campaigned to make Thanksgiving a national holiday; the New England Indians, who boycotted Thanksgiving in the 1970s, calling it a day of mourning; and the 92nd Street Y in New York, which recently launched Giving Tuesday, following in the long American tradition of remembering the poor and needy around Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving says a lot about Americans. It reflects our national identity as a grateful, generous, and inclusive people. When an American takes his or her place at the Thanksgiving table or volunteers at a local food bank, he or she is part of a continuum that dates back to 1621, when the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians sat together for three days to share food and fellowship. The friendly coexistence between the English settlers and the Native Americans would last only...