“Thanksgiving as we celebrate it today hardly pays tribute to the first Thanksgiving we claim to esteem,” Laura Schenone writes in “A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove” ($35).
Her book is subtitled “A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes and Remembrances.”
Schenone goes on to suggest that our present national Thanksgiving holiday is largely the product of Victorian ideals that celebrated the virtues of women, home and hearth.
“We have Sarah Josepha Hale to thank for this.”
In 1846, Schenone explains, Hale, a cookbook author and editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book magazine, began a 17-year campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday of food and family values, that all states would celebrate on the same day.
“In 1863, amidst the Civil War, Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day. He asked the nation to be thankful for the bounties of nature and to come together, North and South, for a single unifying day. The holiday that Sarah envisioned became an icon of American life.”
Associated Press
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