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Why Do We Associate Turkey With Thanksgiving?
When we think of the modern American Thanksgiving, we often think of football and pre-Christmas consumerism. But nothing defines the holiday’s tradition like family gatherings around stuffed turkey.
Side dishes vary from region to region, but this stuffed fowl unites us Americans on the fourth Thursday of November like nothing else. During Thanksgiving 2017, Americans ate a whopping 45 million turkeys.
But what ties this meat so strongly to Thanksgiving, and has it always been associated with the holiday as if it owns it? People eat turkey at Christmas, but the turkey doesn’t enjoy the exclusive claim to that holiday.
Many point to the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving in 1621 as the origin of the holiday. But this is only slightly better than crediting Abner Doubleday with the invention of baseball.
When the Pilgrims settled New England, the people of the British Isles celebrated Harvest Home in late September — a harvest festival accompanied by a feast, dancing, and decorations. It was this celebration that the Pilgrims would have celebrated in the fall of 1621, and to which they introduced the Wampanoags.
But the Pilgrims and their native friends may or may not have eaten turkey at this “first Thanksgiving.” Edward Winslow records that Governor William Bradford sent four men “fowling.” Wild turkeys may have been one of the fowls they brought back…but unless some pilgrim’s long-lost diary is one day discovered we’ll never know.
The Food Timeline has documented a chronological list of Thanksgiving mentions, giving us a sense of how people viewed the holiday and what they ate.
During the colonial period, Thanksgiving remained strictly a New England tradition. For instance, as late as 1779, Juliana Smith wrote to her cousin that members of a Livingston family “had never seen a Thanksgiving dinner before, having been used to keep Christmas Day instead,” as was the custom in New York.
Until late in the 19th century, it appears turkey remained no more prominent than at Christmas — just one of several types of meat on the menu. For instance, the scrumptious menu Smith described mentions turkey as one of several types of meat served. In 1817, a bill of fare for a Connecticut…
