Thanksgiving Stake

One woman wrote letters for thirty-six years to make this a holiday.

Sarah Josepha Hale edited the most widely read magazine in America and used it, year after year, to argue that the country ought to have a national day of thanksgiving. She wrote to governors. She wrote to five presidents. Four of them did nothing. In 1863, with the war on, Lincoln read her letter and issued the proclamation. She was seventy-four.

She also wrote "Mary Had a Little Lamb," which is the thing most people know her for, if they know her at all.

The date has been moved since. In 1939 Roosevelt pushed it a week early to stretch the Christmas shopping season, half the states refused to go along, and for two years the country kept two different Thanksgivings before Congress settled it on the fourth Thursday.

As for the hat — the buckle is an invention. The Pilgrims wore no such thing; buckled hats came into fashion generations later, and the image we all carry around comes from nineteenth-century illustrators who thought it looked properly old-fashioned. We cut ours with the buckle anyway. Some pictures belong to everybody now, whether or not they ever happened.

The turkey beside it is a better story: down to perhaps thirty thousand birds in the whole country a century ago, and back in the millions today.

Set it where people come in — the tree at the drive, the porch post, over the door. It looks right through the whole gray end of November.

Specifications