Although the United States celebrates Thanksgiving every year, we do not know as much about it as we think we do. As research has shown, half of the ideas people are being taught about Thanksgiving are false myths such as the idea that “Thanksgiving” was the first time that the indians and the pilgrims feasted together, they had turkey on the first Thanksgiving, and that “Thanksgiving has been around forever. We need to be more educated about our country and its background so that we can stop lying to ourselves and so we can start properly learning about and celebrating traditions like these.
To settle one of these myths about Thanksgiving, in the article Everything you Learned about Thanksgiving is Wrong, Maya Salam touches on the fact that this event wasn’t even called “Thanksgiving” until the 1830’s when the New Englanders decided to call it that. In 1863, President Lincoln made Thanksgiving an official, national holiday. He did this as a “thank you for civil war Victories”, stated Salam. So contrary to the worldwide belief that Thanksgiving has been around forever, it has only officially been around since 1863.
Thanksgiving didn’t just happen out of nowhere because two different groups of people ate together, a large part of it becoming a national holiday is because people worked for it to be. In the article Abraham and the Mother of Thanksgiving, Maranzani states that Sarah Josepha Hale is “the Mother of thanksgiving”. After growing up ritually celebrating Thanksgiving, Hale published a book called Northwood: A Tale of New England. This showed how much of a committed advocate she was for women’s education. Another thing that shows this is how she consistently wrote and published editorials about the holiday, lobbying to make a “national holiday of thanks”. She did all of this with the hope that it would eventually settle all of the disagreements between the North and the South and maybe even come to unify them. So again, contrary to the belief that Thanksgiving has always been around, people like Sarah Josepha Hale had to work to get this to become a celebrated national holiday.
Along with these two myths, there is also the myth of what the pilgrims and indians ate at this giant harvest of theirs. It is believed by the majority that the indians and the pilgrims had the best feast with a giant turkey and delicious cranberry sauce, when in reality, they only had deer and harvest foods such as corn. The reason we believe this is because of all the marketing that goes into Thanksgiving. Whenever November rolls around, people suddenly get the craving for turkey and cranberry sauce and all of the “traditional Thanksgiving foods”. Why do you think this is? It is because of all of the marketing. From the start of November to Thanksgiving we see TV ads, newspaper articles, and billboards of this giant Thanksgiving feast which of course includes a giant turkey. In the article The Invisible Way that Marketers Set the Menu for Your Thanksgiving Feast, Smithsonian says that marketers not only help create many of the rituals and cultural myths associated with the Thanksgiving meal, but they also legitimized and maintained them. So not only did we get wrong when and how Thanksgiving started, but also what they actually ate at the First Thanksgiving. 
Ragamuffin Day is still celebrated each year with a Thanksgiving parade in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
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