A Moveable Fast

“It's Thanksgiving — time to put our feedbags on,” my family likes to say as we elbow for room next to the Pilgrim and Puritan ghosts the holiday summons to our table. Our colonial forebears probably would not disapprove of our having second and third helpings of sweet potatoes and stuffing, or even rushing off to watch football after the meal — the Pilgrims themselves played lots of games at that first Thanksgiving in 1621. But I imagine they would find fault with our binge for another reason: it is not accompanied by a fast.

To the Pilgrims and Puritans, the community-wide fast, or “day of public humiliation and prayer,” and the thanksgiving feast, or day of “public thanksgiving and praise,” were equal halves of the same ritual. But the fast was not merely a justification for a community-wide gorging. Both customs were important components of a religious rite that served to pacify an angry God who was believed to punish entire communities for the sins of the few with starvation, “excessive rains from the bottles of heaven,” epidemics, crop infestations, the Indian wars and other hardships.

According to the 19th-century historian William DeLoss Love, the New England colonies celebrated as many as nine such “special public days” a year from 1620 to 1700. And as the Puritans were masters of self-denial, days of abstention outnumbered thanksgivings two to one. Fasting, Cotton Mather wrote, “kept the wheel of prayer in continual motion.”

Pleas for rain during spells of drought were the most common reason for fasting. But Puritans also fasted whenever a comet, an evil portent, appeared in the sky; at the start of the Salem witch trials; and throughout the various colonial Indian wars (Mather preached that the horrors in King Philip’s War, against the Wampanoag Indians, had been sent by God to chastise colonists for the sin of wig wearing).

Thanksgivings were celebrated at the end of these and other hardships and in honor of such auspicious events as the “dissipation of the pirates,” the succession of English kings and safe ocean crossings of ships bearing colonists and much needed supplies. Yet these feasts all began with fasts and hours of prayer, during which ministers praised God’s goodness and railed against the sin of gluttony. (Once, after eating too much, John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, fretted that his flesh had “waxed wanton” and begged God to “revive” him.) Intemperance was believed to go against the very idea of gratitude. Of course, people did often overindulge at these thanksgivings. But then additional fast days often immediately followed.

Puritans believed that expressions of thanks to God for their good fortune helped keep his future punishments at bay — a point that does not detract from the genuine appreciation they felt at privations’ end. Nonetheless, participation was mandatory. In 1696, William Veazie of Boston was pilloried for plowing on Thanksgiving Day.

It was in the late 1660s that the New England colonies began holding an “Annual Provincial Thanksgiving.” The holiday we celebrate today is a remnant of this harvest feast, which was theologically counterbalanced by an annual spring fast around the time of planting to ask God’s good favor for the year. Yet fasting and praying also immediately preceded the harvest Thanksgiving. In 1690, in Massachusetts the feast itself was postponed, though not the fasting, out of extraordinary concern that the meal would inspire too much “carnal confidence.”

As life in the New World wilderness got easier, the New England colonies gradually began holding only their annual spring fast and fall harvest feast. Even after Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863, Massachusetts continued to celebrate its spring day of abstention for 31 more years.

In the nearly 400 years since the first Thanksgiving, the holiday has come to mirror our transformation into a nation of gross overconsumption, but the New England colonists never intended for Thanksgiving to be a day of gluttony. They dished up restraint along with gratitude as a shared main course. What mattered most was not the feast itself, but the gathering together in thanks and praise for life’s most humble gifts. Perhaps this holiday season we could benefit from restoring a proper Thanksgiving balance between forbearance and indulgence.

Elyssa East, the author of the forthcoming Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town.