Travis Morin.November 26, 2024 3 minutes, 29 seconds to read
In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the first Presidential Proclamation declaring a national day of Thanksgiving. He did so, largely thanks to the request of a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale from Newport, New Hampshire. Hale was an activist, an abolitionist, and the editor of a popular women’s magazine; she had even written the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” But more than anything, Hale’s lifelong passion was attempting to get the rest of the country to celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving, which had previously been isolated to the New England states.
In one editorial three years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Hale argued that Thanksgiving’s post-election timing represented an opportunity for healing the intense divisions of the nation’s then-tumultuous politics.
We hope the Governors will unite on November 26, the last Thursday in the month. Then the war of politics will be over for the year; and all elections, State and National, will be closed, the harvests of the country gathered in, the preparations for winter made; and the crowning glory of all the blessings God has, during the year, bestowed on our great nation, would be the union of all our States and Territories in a day of National Thanksgiving.”
Flash forward to November 28, 2024, when millions of Americans will gather around their family tables to share a meal to commemorate a day rooted in perseverance through togetherness. And after the ordeal that was Election 2024, it’s safe to say this gathering is more important now than any time since Hale wrote that editorial.
While Americans are no strangers to contentious elections, 2024 was in a class of its own. Criminal trials, two attempted assassinations, an 11th-hour candidate swap following widespread calls for the sitting President’s withdrawal from the race. And all of this happening amidst a daily deluge of divisive rhetoric from both sides of the aisle. What’s more, the passing of Election Day appears to have done little to turn the temperature down.
We offer one piece of advice for this dynamic. Stop it.
“They Gave us our Thanksgiving Holiday,” The Midland Journal (Rising Sun, MD), November 17, 1933.
Democracy is about more than casting a ballot; it’s about more than registering voters; and it’s about more than the partisan sniping that sets our discourse on fire every four years. At its very core, democracy is about one thing: community. A community made up of people from every walk of life and possessing every sort of opinion, but who still agree that it’s better to find common cause and coexist than it is to fracture into factions and fall apart.
Democracy was never meant to be easy, and the work of building and maintaining these communities is a 365-day job. It requires foregoing online arguments in favor of honest to goodness human connections made in grocery stores, town meetings, rec centers, churches, and neighborhood pubs. It requires grace toward those who do not think like we do and humility from ourselves when we don’t have all the facts. Most of all, it requires a willingness to identify first and foremost as a community member while letting the (R) or (D) on your voter registration be the 4th or 5th fact you offer up about yourself to a friendly stranger in the checkout line.
At the end of the day, building community through civil discourse is the only thing that’s going to strengthen the democracy that all of us call home – because it’s the only thing that ever has strengthened the democracy we call home. And with Election 2024 behind us and a new year on the horizon, November 28 feels like the perfect opportunity to gather with our communities and reconnect the ties that bind.
So allow us to lean on the wisdom of the late Sarah Josepha Hale and suggest we all embrace a shared meal and a day of National Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of the month in order to reconnect with family and friends following a tumultuous “war of politics” of our own this past year and, in doing so, begin the process of reuniting, rebuilding, and renewing.
