The twenty-third day of this month will mark the national holiday of Thanksgiving. Millions of families around the United States will gather in their homes and lay their tables heavy with a rich meal. With so many households celebrating the same holiday, there are surely differences in the manners of celebration. A student survey has revealed recent trends in our constantly shifting world.
With a holiday as grand as Thanksgiving, there is of course a varied and interesting national history to go along with it. As many people probably already know, the first recorded Thanksgiving was a feast at the Plymouth colony where the colonists and the Wampanoag Native Americans celebrated a successful harvest together. This feast was most likely only able to take place thanks to the Native Americans of the area, namely the Wampanoag tribe. Without them, it is very likely that the Plymouth colonists would not have been able to survive for very long.
When the colonists first made landfall after their long journey over the sea they had no idea how to effectively farm on this land or what dangers they had to face or how to effectively counter such dangers, that is, until Native Americans choose to teach the colonists how to farm on the land and how to avoid the various dangers of the wilderness. Through a slow process, the Plymouth colony was finally able to stand on its own two feet, eventually celebrating the first Thanksgiving with the Wampanoag tribe, who had helped them a great deal.
For more than two centuries after that, Thanksgiving was separately celebrated by different colonies and states. It wasn’t until 1863 that president Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day to be held each November. This popular holiday has not gone without its own fair share of controversy however. Some Americans, some of which are of Native American descent, believe that Thanksgiving masks the true history of bloodshed and oppression between Native Americans and colonists. Despite this, most Americans chose to look at the past in a positive light and believe that Thanksgiving is a day of giving thanks and moving forward from past animosities.
Yet, in the face of such a grand national history, Herrin has a little Thanksgiving history of its own. In 1988, Mayor Edward Quaglia began the first of his annual Thanksgiving suppers. These dinners were free to all and none were excluded. Mayor Quaglia valued the dinners and saw them as ways to bring the Herrin community together. The Mayor said to the Southern Illinoisan in 1988: “I think it’s another instance of community patriotism.” Later, the Mayor told that same newspaper that Thanksgiving is a “day no one should be alone on.”
During that first meal, six-hundred pounds of turkey was consumed, fifteen meals were delivered, and there were more than two-hundred volunteers alongside six-hundred attendees. Because of the event’s good deeds, the Mayor’s supper won the Governor’s HomeTown Award. Next year, the Mayor wanted to see the number of attendees doubled. As the years passed, more and more hungry Herrinites attended the event. In 2005, the Herrin High School kitchen was used, helping to prepare about one-thousand meals. That dinner was the Mayor Ed Quaglia Memorial Dinner, and each dinner following was given the same name alongside recognition for the attorney Bart Mann. The new mayor, Vic Ritters, helped in the event, working to de-bone turkeys. Two years later, Don Faulker gave musical entertainment. He kept performing, and in 2017 there were over two-thousand meals served, one-hundred and fifty delivered, and one-hundred turkeys. In 2020, the dinner was put on hold due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The following year, the city offered a drive-through supper. As the world returned to as normal a state as it could, 2023 has come. We will see a super held at the Herrin Civic Center on November 23, from eleven o’clock to one o’clock.
162 students responded to a Thanksgiving poll. 72% of them said they prefer side dishes over main courses. The favorite side dish was mashed potatoes, with 22.2% of the vote. It was followed closely by macaroni and cheese (19.1%) and chicken and dumplings (15.4%). By far, the favorite dessert was pumpkin pie (48.8%), with ice cream (15.2%) and apple pie (14.6%) taking the second and third places respectively. Overwhelmingly, 94.5% of HHS students harbor favorable opinions about Thanksgiving.
To conclude, with an expansive national and town history, we can expect another great Thanksgiving for HHS, Herrin, and the nation at large.
