Is it true Thanksgiving was invented by the editor of Harpers Bazaar?
Dear Cecil: A friend of mine says she heard from “a reputable source” that Thanksgiving was actually invented by Harper’s Bazaar in the 1800s. Can this be true? — Mindy, Champaign, Illinois Dear Mindy: Right idea, wrong magazine. Thanksgiving as we know it today–at least on the scale we know it–is largely the creation of Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the first women’s magazines. Mrs. Hale spent 36 years browbeating public officials high and low before finally getting Thanksgiving declared a national holiday in 1863. But first a little history. What we now think of as the original Thanksgiving took place in the fall of 1621 at the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, with the Pilgrims and some 90 Wampanoag Indians on hand to chow down, play volleyball, and exchange native diseases. (No joke–an earlier tribe of Indians had been wiped out by European-imported smallpox.) The occasion came to be a semiofficial holiday among New Englanders, one of many such c
