Pathways, November 2025

Each month, we keep track of the different paths that modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found in our modern life.

In today’s pathways digest, we take a look at the many narratives of Thanksgiving that have emerged over the course of American history. What most of these narratives have in common is that they take the origin story of this holiday—about 50 Pilgrims and 90 Native Americans (Wampanoag) celebrating a successful harvest together in the fall of 1621—and refit it to respond to contemporaneous historical conditions.

Here are the four main genealogies Americans have told about this holiday:

National Unity: In the lead up to the Civil War, Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the popular Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1827 to 1877, was troubled by “increasing factionalism in American society and envisioned Thanksgiving as a commonly-celebrated, patriotic holiday that would unite Americans in purpose and values.” In 1863, amid the Civil War, President Lincoln made the fourth Thursday of November a national holiday.

Economic Prosperity: Can we imagine Thanksgiving without Black Friday? Yet it wasn’t until the 1920s that the holiday became so entangled with the holiday shopping frenzy—in particular when Macy’s kicked off its Christmas Parade in 1924. Then, in 1939, FDR famously tried to shift the holiday up a week to extend the holiday shopping season and speed the nation’s recovery from the Great Depression, but he was met with resistance. And the origin of “Black Friday” is hard to pin down but not particularly auspicious: 

For years, “black days” carried with them ominous connotations, especially when it came to the economy. October 24, 1929, is known as “Black Tuesday,” marking the day when the stock market crashed, starting the Great Depression. In the 1950s, the Philadelphia police used the term “Black Friday” to describe the chaos caused by suburban shoppers and tourists who flooded the streets for the Army-Navy football game the day after Thanksgiving. Then, in the 1980s, merchants reinvented the day to signal a shift from operating “in the red” (with a loss) to “being in the black” (making a profit); the term spread nationally.

Critical and Indigenous Perspectives:  Many historians, scholars, and Indigenous people have pointed out the inaccuracies or elisions of the mythologized Thanksgiving story: 

The First Thanksgiving story emphasizes a peaceful exchange between the Pilgrims and Wampanoag yet seldom includes a Native American perspective. It also rarely acknowledges that peace was short-lived. Within a generation, war would erupt and the Wampanoag would ultimately lose their political independence and much of their territory. This is one of the reasons why Thanksgiving for some Native Americans is not a celebration but a painful reminder of the devastating impact of European colonization on Indigenous people.

In response, Indigenous communities have offered not only critique but counternarrative. Since 1970, many have marked Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning—an annual practice of remembrance and protest, and another resignification of the fourth Thursday of November. 

The Harvest Festival: 

Before Hale began her campaign for a national holiday, Thanksgiving was an “occasional event” among New England colonists—typically a day of prayer rather than a ritualized feast. In this respect, the 1621 gathering resembles—but also departs from—much older agrarian harvest traditions. These traditions reach far beyond mainstream America and Europe, spanning ancient Egypt and Africa, the Jewish feast of Sukkot, the Hindu festival of Pongal, the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, and the harvest ceremonies of Indigenous nations across North America. In virtually every historical period and culture, communities have marked the seasonal harvest with rituals of gratitude and gathering—and while we remember Thanksgiving as the Pilgrims giving thanks, the Wampanoag had their own rich harvest ceremonies. Thanksgiving—and the broader network of harvest festivals it points to—might just tell us something fundamental about the human condition—our need to express gratitude, to be in tune with the seasons, to be in community. 

This brief journey through genealogies of Thanksgiving has shown how flexible this foundational story has always been—and how open to resignification it remains. The question it poses is simple: what kind of Thanksgiving narrative do we need right now?