The traditional Thanksgiving we all know and love is filled with turkey decorations, candy corn, and a huge feast with stuffing, cranberry sauce, a giant roasted turkey, and pumpkin pie.
One thing that’s definitely overlooked is how Thanksgiving started and what the first holiday was actually like. It’s shocking how much traditions have changed over the years.
The very first Thanksgiving was in 1623 and consisted of a Native American tribe, the Wampanoag, and the pilgrims, who traveled over on a ship called The Mayflower in search of a new life.
When the pilgrims arrived, the natives welcomed them and helped them survive. To celebrate their friendship, they sat down to have a Thanksgiving feast, starting the first of many more to come.
However, foods at the First Thanksgiving were very different from the traditional meals we know today. The pilgrims and natives spent two days scouring the woods for anything they could find.
Mostly, the meal consisted of venison (deer), wild-caught fish, like cod and bass, and harvested vegetables like onions, carrots, beans, spinach, and lettuce.
Since sugar wasn’t readily available for the pilgrims and the Wampanoag, things like cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie weren’t on the table.
The pilgrims did like pumpkins, so they had an alternative to pie where they hollowed the pumpkins out, and filled them with milk and honey before they were roasted over an open flame. This created a custard-like dessert.
Up until around the 1860s, Thanksgiving was more of a spontaneous celebration: if you wanted to celebrate, you could on any given date. There wasn’t a traditional menu; citizens ate whatever was available, mostly consisting of more seasonal foods.
The most popular dishes were venison pie, roasted goose, fish, and seasonal vegetables, mainly being squash and corn. While dessert wasn’t really popular at the time, sweeter options like cornbread and pudding were made to celebrate and give thanks on the special day.
On October 3, 1863, former President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving to be a national holiday on the last Thursday of every November. As the Civil War was going on at the time, Lincoln believed our country needed a day to be thankful for their blessings and to pray for our nation.
It wasn’t until the early 1900s that people started to say that if Thanksgiving was a traditional holiday, it should have a traditional meal.
Turkey began becoming a very popular dish because of how common it was on homesteads. The popular side of stuffing today comes from around the 1940s.
Whoever was making the meal would prepare a mix of bread, spices, and veggies, then stuff it inside the turkey while baking to enhance the plain flavor. When the turkey was done, the bread mixture would be soaked with the fats and juices of the turkey, making it a delicious side dish.
Potatoes were very popular, and grew well in the fall season, making mashed potatoes and yams other popular side dishes.
Pumpkin pie was already the main dessert; meals at this time didn’t have a lot of items, but each one was special and took extra time to prepare.
America liked the stereotype of a huge roasted turkey so much that they kept it around for almost 100 years, up till today.
Since everything is bigger in the U.S., over the years we expanded the traditional Thanksgiving menu with other dishes like cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, rolls, and ham. Of course, the dessert menu was added to it, with pecan and apple pie.
It’s insane how much Thanksgiving traditions have changed; from eating whatever you could find led to extravagant meals with more leftovers than what was eaten. It also shows how much America has evolved and changed values and traditions to adapt to the modern day.