[I recommend that you take a refreshing break from your daily activities to listen to the songs first rather than trying to read the blog posting at the same time. The songs will reward your active listening.]
The Songs: Welcome Here & We Give Thanks
Welcome Here is performed by the prolific Canadian singer and music educator Kathy Reid-Naiman, on the above album. It was released in 2009 by the Merriweather Records, a label that she had founded 15 years earlier. The song is based on a Shaker song but I have not been able to find more information about when it was written or who wrote it. Kathy had learned the song from Sandy Byer, who only knew of the first verse so she added another one. Then Kathy added one, and Hannah Naiman (who sings in the chorus) added another. It is unfortunate that they didn’t have access to the full original Shaker song because it has more substantive lyrics. But this “folk processed” version evokes memories for me of our family’s potluck Thanksgiving gatherings as an adult parents, and later at my sister Jaci’s house.
We Give Thanks was written and is performed here by Laurence Cole of Port Townsend, Washington. This version of the song is from his self-published album This Fire. I know Laurence from having participated in some of his singing workshops, and from when he billeted in Victoria for a choir leadership training course. He is a lifelong learner, a wise elder and an activist for multi-part, inspirational participatory singing. (E.g., he wrote a meditative chant around the phrase “Abundance is about the giving, not the having, let it flow.”) Laurence is currently making recordings of all of the 90 songs that he has written freely available on his website, together with their words, music and harmony arrangements. He wrote this song to be a before-meal grace for participants at a weekend-long permaculture workshop he helped organize and teach.
Essay: Thanksgiving Day holidays and their roots [word count 427]
[Note: the word count is there to enable you to estimate how long it might take to read the essay. ]
Although their dates are now about six weeks apart, both the Canadian and American Thanksgiving holidays have their roots in the ancient custom of having a post-harvest festival. The tradition of having a community festival after the harvest is probably as old as agriculture itself, as evidenced by the fact that all agricultural societies have such festivities, and the way that they are celebrated is surprisingly similar. In Europe, specific dates for this ancient tradition became standardized in first the pagan and then the Christian calendars, and later through government proclamations.
In both Canada and the United States quasi-religious days of Thanksgiving were often proclaimed after specific events, such as winning battles or at the end of wars. National annual autumn Thanksgiving days, based on the ancient custom, were originally held closer to the end of October, but this changed for both countries in the early 20th century when that timing became rather crowded with other holidays (Halloween and Armistice/Remembrance Day).
Canada chose to move its annual Thanksgiving Day to an earlier date (when the dying days of summer were more conducive to outdoor activities.) The Americans chose to wrap theirs around the story of the founding of Plymouth Colony by the Mayflower pilgrims in 1620, which they adopted as the national origin story for their country. This perspective ignored the earlier settlement of the land many millennia earlier by Indigenous people, as well as earlier European pioneering settlement by the Spanish in Florida (1530), and the English settlement in Jamestown in 1607. The selection of the Plymouth Colony as America’s origin story reinforced a sense of moral righteousness for Europeans’ reasons for settlement and expansion in the “New World” and was supportive of the then-popular “manifest destiny” view of America’s history and its future.
Because of this origin story they selected the late-November timing that the New England communities and states had settled upon for remembering that aspect of their heritage about 100 years earlier. I do not know why New Englanders had chosen that time because it does not correlate with either the documented giving of thanks to God for the Mayflower having arrived in the New World (Dec 25), nor the documented celebrations that occurred after their first harvest the following year (likely in mid- or late-October.) My own speculation is that the Puritans may have wanted to avoid perpetuating the secular customs that were associated with
Christmas (more about that later in this series) and those descended from the ancient pagan celebration of Imbolg that had evolved into Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day.
Bill Huot
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