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I made Thanksgiving Ramen. Boiled the bones for over 24hrs.

POV: you’re the conservative uncle at Thanksgiving

How we got from George Washington’s Day of Repentance to Turkey Pardons and DEI Storytime.

🍗 Part I: Washington’s 1789 Proclamation: 100% God, 0% Pilgrims ...

The text was unambiguous; the meaning was inarguable. Washington assigned “Thursday the 26th day of November” of that year to be devoted to thanking the “Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be,” and “to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue.” ...

🍗 Part II: The Patchwork Custom (1790–1862)—Fifty States and Fifty Customs

For the next seventy years, Thanksgiving was a state-level affair. Governors sporadically proclaimed days of thanks, usually when they needed to distract the public from the latest railroad scandal. Some New England states held annual days; others observed them irregularly; the South mostly ignored them. ...

🍗 Part III. Proclamation Part II— Lincoln Federalizes Thanksgiving

On October 3, 1863, as the Civil War raged on, Abraham Lincoln issued a decisive proclamation establishing a new, official, federal national holiday: Thanksgiving. Lincoln was good like that; he federalized anything that wasn’t nailed down and a lot of stuff that was. Postal workers were especially thankful. ...

🍗 Part IV. The Quiet 1841 “Discovery” of the Winslow Letter— The Spark of a Myth

We must now glance back a few years, at a small historical footnote (literally): in 1841, New England antiquarian Alexander Young published a collection of colonial documents. His quaint coffee-table-suitable tome included a December 1621 letter penned by one Edward Winslow —a Pilgrim— describing a charming-sounding three-day harvest celebration shared with his settlement’s Wampanoag neighbors. The whole story is encapsulated in a sentence fragment:

“… at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others.”
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

In a footnote, antiquarian Young casually called Winslow’s short description, “the first Thanksgiving.” (Young loved Pilgrims; he also published Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers and Chronicles of the First Planters.) The label was editorial, not historical — and no one paid much attention at the time. The letter had no effect whatsoever on official Thanksgiving proclamations and celebrations before the Civil War. ...

🍗 Part V: The Myth Factory Fires Up (1870–1910)— New England Elites Remake America

After the Civil War, the country’s demographics were shifting, and large numbers of legal immigrants were diluting New England’s cultural dominance. In response, New England’s elites —educators, ministers, and textbook writers— embarked on a marketing campaign to define “the real founding of America” as a story about Pilgrims, Plymouth Rock, and English Protestant values.

This well-intended revisionism is where the version 1.0 of the modern formula emerged: Brave Pilgrims + Friendly Indians + Divine Providence + Charming Potluck Dinner = America. But it was always just a pleasant founding fairy tale. ...

🍗 Part VI: Industrialized Mythmaking (1910–1945)— Pilgrim Mass-Production

With industrialization came industrialized public schooling, mass-produced national textbook contracts, and the rise of “civic holidays” to help Americanize millions of new immigrants. ...

🍗 Part VII: De-Christianization (1945–1970s)— The Side Dish Gets Dumped

After WWII, as the global communist revolution shifted into high gear, and McCarthy chased Reds around the State Department, Democrats chased McCarthy around the Senate, and the United States mysteriously experienced a severe bout of secularization. ...

🍗 Part VIII: From National Repentance to National Freshman Five

This is the holiday’s historical arc:

• 1789: Washington Proclamation I — All God, no Pilgrims.

• 1863: Lincoln Proclamation II — Still all God, still zero Pilgrims.

• 1870–1910: New England elites — haul Pilgrims and Indians out of a dusty footnote and add them to God.

• 1910–1945: Industrial America — mass-produce the Pilgrim Myth; Natives and Early Americans expand, God shrinks.

• 1945–1970s: Progressives — All Pilgrims and Indians, no God, plus a new turkey pardon.

We started with 0% Pilgrims and 100% thanksgiving to the Divine Creator, and somehow wound up with a Thanksgiving that feels like a DEI refresher module with better food and a celebration of conspicuous consumption (plus an appointment with the treadmill).

Don’t get me wrong. I was raised on Pilgrims and Indians. I made construction paper headdresses in school. It’s a great story. Furthermore, the New England protestant elites who started the whole myth going had good intentions. But liberals effortlessly stripped off the Pilgrims’ religious motives and turned the whole thing into a way for “colonizers” to thank “original land owners” with roasted turkey and stuffing.

Like those who lived in 1789 and 1863, we are also veterans of a great war, a bioengineered war waged against us by co-opted parts of our own government. We are thankful to our Creator, for shepherding us through that terrifying ordeal and delivering us from our enemies.