During the holiday season here in Oxford, my American eyes are rather boggled by the sudden arrival of Christmas decorations the day after Halloween in all of the High Street shops and along the windows of every church and school. It’s not that the season is any less commercialized in the United States; rather, it’s that here in Britain, everything slides right from All Hallows Eve into the Night Before Christmas, without the intermediary celebration that is Thanksgiving.
There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why this holiday hasn’t been transplanted back to the motherland. After all, the holiday is held as a memorial to the Pilgrims, who instituted a day of thanks for surviving their first winter in Plymouth, Massachusetts – after sailing away from Britain to America on the Mayflower. For much of the history of the United States, Thanksgiving was marked more heavily than Christmas, especially in New England, where descendants of the original settlers still lived.
Today, of course, Thanksgiving is important in every part of America. It ties in so neatly to the holiday season, with festivities on the last Thursday in November. At school, we’d make paper Pilgrim hats and cornucopias to decorate the windows, before replacing them with Christmas trees and Hanukah menorahs in December. I grew up watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, held in Manhattan every year, with a float shaped like a turkey at the head of the line and Santa Claus bringing up the rear, ushering in the Christmas season as Thanksgiving ended.
And while many British friends have told me that our Thanksgiving dinners – a turkey in the centre of the table, mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and stuffing, butternut squash and green beans – are really just another rendition of the Christmas meal, it’s not the same. For one thing, Christmas dinner doesn’t end with a pumpkin or apple pie, smelling of cinnamon and sugar and served piping hot. There’s also no parade to watch, or Thanksgiving football on television.
The holidays may begin earlier in Britain because there’s no Thanksgiving to split the months. But I for one intend to have my own Thanksgiving festivities with other friends who speak in my American tongue. As my compatriots will tell you, there’s nothing like this holiday to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside – in fact, it’s probably the only thing associated with the Puritans that will ever do so!
