Dishing Up Thanks: The Hotties We’re Grateful for This Thanksgiving, Part 2

Interesting that you have three Brits and one Irishman there! So choosing them for Thanksgiving? Also interesting, lol!

Exactly, @Lynne! We like to give thanks globally, not just geo-restrict our love.

But Thanksgiving is the US giving thanks for freeing themselves from the tyrannical British, or did I get that wrong?
Anyway, the choices are wonderfully sound, IMO, except - where's Richard Armitage?

@Lynne, Thanksgiving is a harvest holiday imported from Europe, not necessarily tied to our throwing off the yoke of you Brits (Canada celebrates it too, for example). And Armitage! I wrestled with that, eventually settling on Clive, who's had my heart longer, if not more ardently, than Mr. Armitage.

In the interest of international Thanks Giving, I propose Mark Dacascos(?), Wo Fat from Hawaii 5-O.

I agree with Kwana. Idris Elba is proof of perfection.

(*discreet cough*)

The original feast celebrated at Plymouth colony was to give thanks to God for safely guiding the colonists to the New World, and also to give thanks for the colony finally having a full larder. Freedom from Britain was not mentioned, and the full larder was as much a result of successful hunting and fishing as of farming.

The first national proclamation of Thanksgiving, made by the Continental Congress in 1777, did mention the British; but we would scarcely recognize in it our own annual celebration, since it would have prominently featured fasting and prayer.

The holiday we celebrate as Thanksgiving was proclaimed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. The official proclamation said nothing about the Revolutionary War, shaking off the British yoke, or anything else of that nature. It was entirely concerned with specimens of Divine Providence that were held to have accrued to the United States during that year. The closest it comes to mentioning European nations is this part:

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict.

That's partly about France, which the South kept trying to drag in as an ally, and partly about Britain, which did some saber-rattling early in the war after an American ship stopped one of theirs and took off three would-be Confederate diplomatic emissaries to France.

IMO, the real subject and intended audience of Lincoln's proclamation was the South, which was not gaining ground, or getting encouraging results from international diplomacy, or becoming stronger and more populous; and where commerce, manufacture, and agriculture were definitely not continuing as usual. One way to translate its message would be: "We thank thee, O Lord, for giving us the ability to go on fighting this war, now and for years to come, without breaking a sweat." Another would be: "If all these things are evidence of the favor of God Almighty, then we have it and the South doesn't."

The proclamation also had an administrative purpose, which was to substitute a unified national holiday for the patchwork of state-declared Thanksgiving days celebrated in New England. Thanksgiving wasn't celebrated at all in the South. The redoubtable Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book, had been campaigning for fifteen years for a single nationwide date for Thanksgiving, and had written letters about it to every president since Zachary Taylor. The others ignored her; Lincoln did not. It is thus arguable that Thanksgiving belongs in the same category as the transcontinental railway, land grant colleges, and the Homestead Act: proposed Federal legislation that had been languishing for some time, but which became law during Lincoln's first administration because absent Southern legislators weren't there to object to it.

Finally, while the way we celebrate Thanksgiving owes something to European harvest festivals, it would be an error to mistake it for one. Harvest Home is a folk custom, with no necessary connection to government or rulers. By contrast, throughout American/United States history, thanksgiving days have been proclaimed and established by civil authority*, and they've always had an ideological component.

(*Plymouth Colony in 1621 wasn't big on distinguishing between secular and religious authority. As of 1623, it was Governor Bradford who was proclaiming days of thanksgiving.)