Introduction: In this article, James Pylant will surprise you with the giddy revelry that our ancestors once enjoyed in celebrating Thanksgiving. James is an editor at GenealogyMagazine.com and author for JacobusBooks.com, is an award-winning historical true-crime writer, and authorized celebrity biographer.
On 24 November 1904, the Colorado Springs Gazette announced:
Not a person, not a stranger in the city, nor a man, woman or child unable to secure a Thanksgiving dinner from their own resources, need go hungry today.
For example, with turkey, chicken, roast beef, pork and beans, pies, cakes, and cranberry sauce, the People’s Mission in Colorado City expected to feed more than 500 people.
That’s how we often envision our ancestors commemorating the November holiday: opening their hearts and homes to friends and family for a traditional dinner. President George Washington recognized Thanksgiving by proclamation in 1789, but it was not a federal holiday until 1885; by congressional act in 1942, it was designated as the fourth Thursday in November.
In 1863, more than 20 years before it became a federal holiday, President Abraham Lincoln asked Americans to recognize a national day of thanksgiving, “with humble penitence.” However, that’s not how our ancestors always observed the holiday.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1874, residents of Jersey City, New Jersey, were greeted with the sound of church bells ringing as they soberly made their way into houses of worship for special holiday sermons. But afterward things changed rather suddenly.
This article reports:
A little later and the warlike drum, energetically beaten by the hands of a small boy, whose skillet-helmeted head struck terror into admiring throngs of little ones, woke up the remainder of the population and the day’s business commenced in earnest. A mania for cast-off clothing, which had done duty on the female form divine, seemed to have universally seized the boys. In every section of the city they appeared, tricked out in old bonnets, old skirts, hoop skirts without any other attempt at ornamentation, and all masked in hideous pasteboard “false faces.” They marched in troops, with beating drums and flying flags, and assaulted every open store with a demand for “prizes,” and they got them.
The “Thanksgiving maskers,” as they were called, were not exclusive to Jersey City, as explained by a New Orleans newspaper in 1872. It’s little wonder that the city that hosts Mardi Gras approved of this Thanksgiving revelry.
In 1879, citizens of Tucson, Arizona, made Thanksgiving a daylong event, complete with a church sermon, a baseball game, and – for the city’s “society people” – a masquerade party. The ball offered a feast and a grand march that began at 8:30 p.m. and concluded at two o’clock the next morning. The partiers wore lavish Chinese, Turkish, and Egyptian costumes, while Pocahontas, Mary Queen of Scots, and Little Red Riding Hood were spotted among the crowd. One gentleman came as a bottle of Bourbon.
Meanwhile that year, Cincinnatians attended “Thanksgiving matinees” at leading theaters. Grand balls, dress parties, banquets, concerts, and a beauty contest were among several events. There were also church sermons and a “good old-fashioned game of football.” This newspaper article reported it all, including the memorable headline:
Rest for the Tired, Sermons for the Religious, Amusements for the Giddy
Thanksgiving matinees were also held in Chicago. In 1890, the Deshon Opera Company’s performances were “standing room only” on Thanksgiving night. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1891, the Columbia Social Club issued 500 invitations for a “grand masked ball” to be held on Thanksgiving Eve.
The Linsly Military Institute in Wheeling, West Virginia, held an annual Thanksgiving ball at the armory.
This article reports:
The costumes of the ladies were handsome and elaborate, while the students never looked more manly than in their military uniforms… It was nearly midnight when the grand march took place… The ball continued until nearly three o’clock this morning.
By the 1910s, Thanksgiving maskers were more common in New York than other U.S. locales.
This article reports:
In addition to eating turkey and incidentally being grateful for past mercies, New York has a Thanksgiving Day custom that is observed in few if any other communities in America. It is a masker’s parade, indulged in chiefly by the children, but also enjoyed and in many cases participated in by the grownups.
The custom is believed to have been originated by the foreign-born population of the big city, who, while they have no Thanksgiving in their own lands, make use of other holidays for carnival masquerades and seized upon Thanksgiving for that purpose after coming to America.
Although this article calls it a New York custom in 1911, Thanksgiving masks were still being worn in the West, too. An opera house in Winnemucca, Nevada, was the scene of a lively masquerade ball on Thanksgiving night in 1912, and there were others.
However, mask-wearing events became shifted to Halloween in the 1920s. In Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History, Lesley Bannatyne wrote:
“The Thanksgiving masquerade existed as late as the 1930s, then suddenly vanished, and then Halloween costumes and parades began to gain national popularity.”
In place of masked revelry, Thanksgiving Day parades became popular. Thanksgiving-themed newspaper articles focused on dressing up dining tables with sparkling crystal, shining silver, and snowy, spotless linen. And of course the feast. The “giddy amusements” of past Thanksgivings faded from memory…
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Note on the header image: additional Thanksgiving maskers, c. 1910. Credit: George Grantham Bain Collection; Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.