Thanksgiving 1998 - 04 December 1998

After long beating at sea, they fell with that land which is called Cape Cod. Being thus arrived in a good harbour and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.

It used to be an annual pleasure to start the letter at this time with a talk about the annual festival of Thanksgiving. Thursday, a week ago, was the great day and that passage is from the diary of one William Bradford, a literate Yorkshireman and a religious man, dedicated to purifying the corrupt Church of England on some foreign shore.

He collected a nondescript crew of Dutch so-called Pilgrims and failed English businessmen, a lawyer or two, carefree working men, sailors, knockabout workmen, picked up from the streets or the docks of London and packed on to the large ship called the Mayflower, by the merchants who'd put up the money for the voyage across that unknown vast and furious ocean.

By the time the Mayflower set sail, which was the summer of 1620, it's been calculated that about 6,000 English and Dutchmen, Englishmen mostly, had crossed the ocean and the early ones had drifted into Bermuda or Barbados and soon afterwards, there was a permanent colony set up, way south, in Virginia, of about 1,000 surviving English, 4,500 having died at sea or perished subsequently from starvation, massacre or disease.

But to return to the stout and eloquent Mr Bradford. (I should mention in passing what I've always tactfully bypassed saying, that considering the motley nature of the crew, claiming an ancestor who sailed on the Mayflower is a very dubious distinction.) However, the main point is that over Thanksgiving, the great family festival for all Americans, of whatever ethnic or religious irreligious faith, there's always hung a reverential but cheerful air.

The original day of Thanksgiving was a day just short of a year after the November landing on Cape Cod, a day set aside to celebrate the first harvest, which had just about guaranteed the survival and the success of the Plymouth colony. Harvest, I may say, of crops they had not known or much used in England. The vital crop, meaning essential to life was, as you might guess, the staple of the Indians' diet, corn, known in England as maize.

It was, and still is, the staple crop, the essential rudimentary maintenance food of the peoples, nations through the Caribbean islands, down through Mexico and all the countries of South America. And the Thanksgiving dinner, from the earliest records, comprised corn pudding or/and corn bread along with the sweet potato.

The main dish, however, from the earliest times, was something the first English were astonished to see. A gallinaceous, large bird, wild, strutting all over the place, a bird that did not come wild in Europe, indeed probably the Pilgrims had never seen one – the turkey. And, from the beginning, the inevitable sauce, made from a berry that grew in the bogs of Cape Cod, was the cranberry. For the pudding, or what in America became called the dessert, there was always pumpkin pie.

The television coverage of Thanksgiving starts on the Wednesday evening, when we are told that, this time, about 60-odd million Americans, one in four, will be travelling by train or car, back to the family roots, which usually means to the oldest member of the family who has a home, some extra bedrooms and the means to put on a feast.

So the first picture we see taken at Kennedy Airport, then O'Hare, Chicago, then perhaps Miami, long shots of long lines, queues of mainly happy people, only too willing to tell that they haven't seen old dad in ten years or they're flying 2,000 miles just for the dinner and the night because it's the only time in the year when the whole family, in this case, ten adults and 24 children, can get together.

Next we cut to Sarajevo. Yes, the Sarajevo, pan shot of soldiers sitting at trestle tables in a bare field in appalling, bleak weather, raising a turkey leg to camera and hoping the folks back home are watching. Cut to the White House lawn and the graceful, classical, white façade, floodlit. Dolly down to the whitish head. Who can it, can it be? It is, it is the President of the United States.

Not a mile away, a committee of Congress is sitting and nattering whether to impeach him or not to impeach him, but here on the White House lawn, just alongside the great Christmas balsam fir, is the president, about to perform the gravest of the traditional Thanksgiving rituals. In front of the president, and indeed hiding most of him, except his pink face and whitening hair, is a huge white object – a turkey of the bronze, broad-breasted breed.

They raise them these days up to 65lbs and I shouldn't be surprised if this beauty hadn't matched the record. The bird is pretty well composed for a turkey about to die, fluttering a little, chunnering an occasional low protest. But wait, it is not going to die. The whole point of the ceremony is to show the President of the United States, on the evening when we're told 45 million turkeys are doomed to wind up on a plate, this one bird is to be pardoned and led away to end his days in dignity. The president says so, pronounces the pardon, there is warm applause, the lights twinkle and we shed a tear.

It's a nice parlour game question to guess which president thought up this charming, and I must say, most moving ceremony. George Washington? Jefferson, Lincoln? Sounds more like FDR than anybody. He had a jokey side, which with that splendid face, he could carry off with all due mock solemnity. Well no, the answer is Harry S Truman. Who would have thought the old bantam cock had so much poetry in him?

On Thursday Thanksgiving evening itself, the telly routinely shows us a scene or two that are no less impressive for being predictable. In Atlanta, Georgia, ten thousand sitting, chomping people in an auditorium – the homeless. Similar scenes in all the big cities. We see a great hall in New York City, packed with long tables and again, the homeless, dinner guests of the Salvation Army. There have been some changes. An Army captain who's seen many of these dinners says that in the old days, 20, 30 years ago, most of the diners were street people, bums, vagrants, many alcoholics and there today still, their numbers compounded by junkies, but the new and surprising element is families, several generations, white, black, Asian and, dressed for Thanksgiving anyway, looking like the last people in New York lacking for a home, let alone a meal.

The captain reports glumly that they reflect the great increase in the past few years, in the actually hungry. One of those baffling, preposterous mysteries in a country that has enough food to feed the six billion people on earth several times over. If you'd like to ponder a puzzle in economic geography, consider that while those mass meals were being given to the city's hungry, consider that in the Pacific north-west of America there is a new depressed area, the states of Washington and Oregon. Three-quarters of their wheat goes to Japan, but not now, so the wheat is stored or rots and the farmers begin to worry about their mortgage.

There was one Thanksgiving happening we've certainly never seen or could ever guess at before. On Cape Cod, that good harbour where William Bradford and his crew were brought safe to land, there was on Thursday a straggle of American Indians, a protest march bearing banners with the new strange device, "We do not celebrate the arrival of the Europeans who invaded our country".

Now in the last decade or so, many cities have gone easy on celebrating Columbus Day, since radicals of all nationalities, but especially the natives of some Central and Southern American countries, have threatened and in some places performed, violence in memory of the man now considered far and wide, a monster symbol of Europe, the invader. But till now we've never been led to think of the Pilgrims as such. Time marches on, with a nasty look.

There were no reported Indian marches in the Deep South or the Far West, where some tribes have, in federal courts, reclaimed their ancient lands, raised money to build casinos and are now the legally affluent heirs of the mobsters who used to murder each other over disputed gambling territories in the desert. So there is also the new, freakish fact of some millionaire Indians who could stage Thanksgiving feasts as sumptuous as any put on by, say the wives of the old New York robber barons in the 1890s.

Talking of which glittering scenes reminds me of Winston Churchill's encounter with an American turkey dinner. As a young soldier of 20, he pulled his mother's apron strings, who pulled other powerful strings, to get him released from his regiment in order to go off to Cuba and watch the turn-of-century fighting there. On his way he passed through New York and was invited to dinner by a society hostess, friend of his mother's.

Poised over the turkey, the hostess said, "Which, Mr Churchill, would you prefer?"

"Er," he said, "I should like the breast".

"In America, " the lady rebuked, "we talk about the white meat and the dark meat".

Next morning a corsage arrived from the 20-year-old, at the hostess's house. It bore a little card saying, "Thank you so much for a delightful evening, I do hope you will wear this on your white meat".

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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