How 2 Famous Authors Started the Thanksgiving Turkey Tradition

Make this year's Thanksgiving turkey your best yet. Brent Hofacker/Shutterstock

A Thanksgiving without a turkey is like a Christmas without a tree.

George Washington noted that it was “the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly implore his protection and favor.” This was stated at the beginning of his Thanksgiving Day proclamation, which he issued on October 3, 1789. Through the proclamation, Washington assigned the country’s first Thanksgiving Day to take place Nov. 26 so that Americans as a whole could “unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks.”

However, for the next 74 years, this “more perfect Union” was less than perfect in celebrating simultaneously. Thanksgiving Day across the States was generally celebrated at any given time between October and January. Regardless, Americans now had a day to set aside to focus solely on being thankful for their blessings. But what would this day look like?

Charles Dickens and the Prize Turkey

Charles Dickens, the English writer and social critic whose book "A Christmas Carol" was influential in establishing turkey as the iconic centerpiece for holiday meals.

Early Americans could reference the Pilgrims and Indians of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 at Plymouth. According to colonist William Bradford’s journal, that season they had waterfowl, a “great store of wild turkeys,” along with deer and Indian corn. Turkey is mentioned almost in passing, so it isn’t definitively known if turkey was served during this special occasion.

Just as the English played a role—to say the least—in both the founding of the Plymouth colony and the American Revolution, an English writer by the name of Charles Dickens played a substantial role in placing the turkey as the focal point for holiday meals.

In his classic morality tale “A Christmas Carol,” the wealthy but miserly Ebenezer Scrooge pays his employee, Bob Cratchit, so little that he can’t afford a turkey for Christmas dinner. The most the poor Cratchit family can afford is a goose. It isn’t until the end of the story, when Scrooge has been given a supernatural opportunity to peruse his past, present, and future, that he decides to make amends for his ill doings. His first thought is to help the Cratchits, and, luckily for him, it’s the perfect time to do it―Christmas Day.

When Scrooge lifts open the window on Christmas morning, he sees a young boy walking by and inquires about the turkey that was hanging in the window at the “Poulterer’s” on the corner.

“Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there?—Not the little prize Turkey: the big one?” ...

“It’s hanging there now,” replied the boy. Scrooge then promised the boy a half-a-crown if he returned with the poulterer and turkey in “less than five minutes.”

It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ‘em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.

As Mark Connelly, professor of modern British history at the University of Kent, once wrote, “The tale conjures up the image of a perfect and nostalgic Victorian Christmas, full of turkey, mistletoe and goodwill.”

According to Cathy Kaufman, chair of the Culinary Historians of New York, the British believed that “Christmas was ill suited for the urban industrial world,“ which rather characterizes the setting of Dickens’s book: London. In America, Christmas was viewed nearly the same—except perhaps in the South, where southerners often celebrated the 12 days of Christmas.

After the publication of his book, Christmas in Britain returned to its earlier medieval traditions, where the holiday was celebrated for more than a single day and the feasts were extensive. As Kaufman wrote, “Dickens’s ‘Christmas Carol’ put a benign face on Christmas, focusing on a quaint and quiet Victorian family holiday, punctuated by small acts of voluntary charity.”

Dickens in America

When the book was released in America in January 1844, the change, according to a lecture given by William Makepeace Thackeray in 1852, was evidently more impactful as it created “a wonderful outpouring of Christmas good-feeling; of Christmas punch-brewing; an awful slaughter of Christmas turkeys, and roasting and basting of Christmas beef.”

The turkey is only mentioned once at the end of “A Christmas Carol,” and the reader never witnesses the final dinner at the Cratchit home. “All we know is that Scrooge sent Cratchit the biggest turkey in the poulterer’s shop,” Kaufman surmises. “It was also the food image that resonated most deeply in America.”

Turkey, which is an American bird, became even more prominent in the United States after the Dickens tale. But in 1844, Thanksgiving was still celebrated in different months according to state, and turkey had yet to become the “food image” of choice for the holiday. It took an American author to combine those two.

Hale and the Start of an American Tradition

Sarah Josepha Hale, the American writer, activist, and editor of Godey's Lady's Book who campaigned for Thanksgiving to become a national holiday.

Sarah Josepha Hale was one of the most influential people on 19th-century American culture. She was born in 1788, the year the Constitution was ratified, and nearly an exact year before Washington made his Thanksgiving proclamation. As a widow and mother of five, her first novel, “Northwood; Or, Life North and South: Showing the True Character of Both,” was published in 1827―16 years before Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” Her novel’s success opened the door for her to become editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, an influential magazine. Under her leadership, magazine subscriptions increased 15-fold, from 10,000 to 150,000.

The magazine significantly influenced American fashion, etiquette, and food. As editor, she also wrote a monthly column. In 1846, she began pushing for Thanksgiving to become a national holiday. She wrote to every president from Zachary Taylor to Abraham Lincoln, insisting on the creation of a national Thanksgiving Day holiday.

Presidents after Washington had issued Thanksgiving proclamations before. Even Lincoln had issued one in 1861, another in 1862, and a third in the summer of 1863. The 1863 proclamation was issued mid-July and indicated August 6 to be “observed as a day of National thanksgiving, praise, and prayer” and for citizens “to assemble on that occasion in their customary places of worship.”

Hale believed that Thanksgiving should take place on a specific day every year. She sent a letter to Lincoln on Sept. 28, 1863, stating that “for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritative fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution.”

Five days later, Lincoln issued a new proclamation stating: “It has seemed to me fit and proper that [these bounties] should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

The following year, Lincoln issued another proclamation for Thanksgiving Day to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November. It would be the first time the holiday was celebrated across the States on the same day in consecutive years. The date would not change until 1939, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed the second to last Thursday to be Thanksgiving Day in an attempt to boost the economy by extending the holiday shopping season.

The Thanksgiving Template

When it came to what this “glorious Festival” should look like, Hale had already provided an intricate portrait in her novel:

The table, covered with a damask cloth ... was now intended for the whole household, every child having a seat on this occasion, and the more the better, it being considered an honor for a man to sit down to his Thanksgiving supper surrounded by a large family.

Hale went on to discuss the food, which included a sirloin of beef, leg of pork, joint of mutton, chicken pie, bowls of gravy, plates of vegetables, pickles, preserves, butter, wheat bread, plumb pudding, custards, pies, cakes, sweetmeats, fruits, currant wine, ciders, and ginger beer. But it was the turkey that stood out at this fictional, yet influential Thanksgiving table.

The roasted turkey took precedence on this occasion, being placed at the head of the table; and well did it become its lordly station, sending forth the rich odour of its savoury stuffing, and finely covered with the frost of the basting.

According to the New England Historical Society, Hale’s description of the Thanksgiving Day table setting “became a template for the rest of the country.”

Although Hale had written her book 16 years before Dickens wrote his, it was Dickens who, according to one food critic, “popularized a prized Christmas turkey ... replacing the traditional goose with a more iconic bird.” Twenty-six years after “A Christmas Carol” reached the shores of America, Congress passed a bill making Thanksgiving Day a national holiday. Washington and Lincoln may have put into words precisely the purpose behind Thanksgiving, but it was Dickens and Hale who influenced the way we celebrate it.