One More Thanksgiving on Widowhood Lane

Like so many of women’s contributions to our country they usually got omitted from the history books in past centuries because the publishers, back then, were an all-boys club and they didn’t play fair with women and people of color. For example did you know that we can thank a woman---Sarah Josepha Hale---for the entire United States celebrating Thanksgiving on a fixed date? Before her forty years (yes, FORTY YEARS) of lobbying politicians including five presidents, each state celebrated Thanksgiving on a different date between October and January. Finally, she persuaded Abraham Lincoln that a national day of thanksgiving would foster a sense of national unity. Thus he proclaimed it so and we’ve all been celebrating Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November ever since. 

Sarah was an American writer and an influential editor of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine but today, unless you’re a women’s history buff, most people might only know her as the author of the nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb. If you’ve dug deep into the history of the Bunker Hill Monument you might also know that Sarah was instrumental in its completion by organizing fund raisers and using the power of her pen to raise $30,000 to make sure the 221-foot obelisk got built when the men in charge ran out of money. And if you’re a stalker-like women’s history aficionado you might even own a bobble head doll created in her likeness by the New Hampshire Historical Society. Give a woman a century or two and maybe she’ll get the recognition she deserves. 

Three of my grandparents were dead before I was born and the forth one died a few years after so I don’t have memories of going, “over the river and through the woods, now Grandmother's cap I spy! Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done? Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!” My memories of Thanksgiving don’t come into focus until the ‘60s when I was in college and we’d all gather at my brother’s house in the country for a the traditional celebration. He and my sister-in-law had three small children and it was easier for them to host than to bring the kids into town where our parent’s house wasn’t big enough to fit everyone around a table. I never had much interest in helping in the kitchen and by default I’d be the one to take the kids outside to play while the “women’s work” was going on. If there was snow that meant sledding, if not there was a woods in their back yard and forts to build.

Over the years families and traditions change. By the time my brother and wife divorced, my parents had remodeled our cottage for year-around living and it became our holiday destination until my mom died in 1983. After that, my husband and I were anchorless for a year or two until Don’s sister-in-law’s started including us in with her large family and I shared Thanksgiving with them right up through my first Thanksgiving after Don died. That was the last time they all got together as one cohesive family. As a widow I got a few invitations in years two and three post-widowhood but I turned them down because they would have made me feel lonelier eating with mostly strangers. This year I’ll be having Thanksgiving dinner at my youngest niece's house on a lake. Her two year old grandson and my brother will be there and as the second oldest in attendance I won’t be allowed to help much in the kitchen. It feels a little like I’m coming full circle. My niece always loads me up with left overs when I go to her get-togethers so I will have turkey sandwiches in the days that follow and that hasn’t happened since my mother died.

Coming full circle isn’t, of course, the same as going home again. Thomas Wolfe was right, we can’t do that. Even if the same houses are there to go to, families are fluid. People die, babies are born. Some marriages fail, new people come into the fray and new traditions evolve. But there is one thing I hope doesn’t become a tradition; this year, I’m hearing people online say that because of the election they aren’t looking forward to Thanksgiving. So If you need a bit of trivia to change the topic of a conversation that's heading toward fisticuffs at your dinner table, try sharing the story of Sarah’s forty year campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. But you might want to leave out the fact that you learned about her from a Born-Again Feminist lest the snipping and sneering starts in all over again. Feminist get a bad rap in some circles. ©