HAPPY THANKSGIVING & ALL THAT GOOD STUFF! BUT DO YOU KNOW WTF YOU'RE CELEBRATING?

Today, Americans everywhere are observing the Thanksgiving holiday - united in a shared tradition evoked by the familiar themes of family reunions, turkey dinners and Pilgrim precedents. It is a time for charity and harmony, as symbolized by the legendary "First Thanksgiving" when, as public memory tells us, the Plymouth colonists and their Wampanoag neighbors gathered to enjoy the fruits of the harvest on a autumnal afternoon. Thanksgiving is, above all, an occasion for "gathering together," even in this era of anxiety and division.
Public memory, however, can be illusory. Past Thanksgivings were not always harmonious or comfortable. Some were proclaimed for bloody victories over other Americans, Native or Northern and Southern. Returning home once meant braving perilous conditions far more intimidating than security searches by Transportation Security Administration agents. Social divisions could (and still do) mock the ideal of a uniting holiday spirit, as some enjoyed opulent feasts while others died in battle or starved in wretched conditions.

In fact, the holiday has always had its bright spots and shadows. The more you learn about it, the history of the American Thanksgiving becomes a case study in contrasts - between myth and history, between coming together and splitting apart.

Thanksgiving began as a sober Christian celebration of God's providential mercies. Thanksgivings were not automatic annual events, but proclaimed only when communities prospered; when they did not, a day of penitent fasting might be declared instead. This Calvinist custom, imported into the New England colonies, is where the holiday of Thanksgiving got it start.

But because we often tailor history to suit our needs, it has been assumed that the tradition began in Plymouth in 1621. Actually, there never was a single "first Thanksgiving" from which all subsequent holidays followed. The Plymouth celebration was not a religious holiday, but rather a secular harvest festival. Forgotten by later generations, it played no role in Thanksgiving tradition until it was rediscovered in 1841. Americans, looking to history for reassurance during the regional tensions that followed the Era of Good Feelings, recruited the conciliatory Pilgrim event to become their emblematic Thanksgiving origin - and thus the holiday we know today was, more or less, born.

And as the original New England Thanksgiving grew more secular, it became an early winter holiday custom that eventually spread throughout the entire nation. Some regions - Virginia in particular - resisted the adoption of this Yankee holiday, although Jefferson Davis proclaimed a nationwide Thanksgiving before Abraham Lincoln did. And while Lincoln did declare the first in the modern sequence of Thanksgivings in 1863, Thanksgiving did not become a legal holiday until 1941.

The now familiar image of the outdoor Plymouth feast was unknown before the 1890s. Earlier, Thanksgiving was represented by turkeys, church attendance, family gatherings - and racial violence. Popular imagery depicted Native/Colonial hostility rather than accommodation (uncomfortably echoing the rhetoric of modern Native partisans). Only after the Indian Wars ceased and "First Thanksgiving" imagery appeared did images of violence give way to those of racial harmony.

The transformation of the austere Puritan Thanksgiving into an indulgent family holiday paralleled the metamorphosis of the humble Plymouth colonists into elite "Pilgrim Fathers." The focus shifted from sleigh rides to Pilgrims, pumpkins and cornstalks, and from grandfather's patriarchal table to grandmother's cozy kitchen.

The holiday is still evolving. Although it has eluded the excesses of commercialization, Thanksgiving is being squeezed between the profit-making juggernauts of Halloween and Christmas. The symbolic Pilgrims seem secure, but their affirmative message may be damaged as much by casual cynicism as by commerce.

Thanksgiving did not historically begin on that golden afternoon in Plymouth Colony when colonists and Natives sat down for their famous feast, but perhaps it should have. There, when for one brief shining moment, cultural differences were set aside for peace, harmony and culinary fellowship, we have an inspiring example of what America is capable of.

Can a nation divided along economic and political fissures find collective satisfaction in established custom? We can embrace the uplifting significance of Thanksgiving or join the culture of complaint that finds the holiday imperialist, carnivorous and historically suspect. It all hinges on how we want to shape our future.

Baker is the author of "Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday."