The Woman Who Gave Us Thanksgiving

Last week, the University of Michigan released its Consumer Sentiment Index: 51. That's the second-lowest reading in the survey's history, trailing only June 2022 when inflation was at a 40-year high. The current conditions gauge hit an all-time record low. Views of personal finances are the dimmest since 2009.

The Conference Board tells a similar story—consumer confidence at its lowest since April, down nearly seven points in a single month. People are worried about jobs, prices, and what comes next.

The numbers reflect something real. Some of you are feeling it. Many people across the country are struggling with the cost of groceries, housing, and the persistent sense that the ground beneath them isn't quite stable.

• • •

In 1863, America was literally at war with itself. Hundreds of thousands dead. Families torn apart. The outcome uncertain.

That year, President Lincoln received a letter from a 74-year-old magazine editor named Sarah Josepha Hale. She had been writing to presidents for seventeen years—Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan—making the same request each time: establish a national day of Thanksgiving.

Her argument was simple. In the darkest hour, gratitude could unify a fractured country.

Lincoln finally said yes.

• • •

Sarah Josepha Hale was widowed at 34 with five children and no safety net. She turned to writing to survive, eventually becoming the editor of Godey's Lady's Book—the most widely read publication in pre-Civil War America.

And for two decades, she campaigned for a national holiday built around one idea: giving thanks.

• • •

Here's what strikes me about Sarah Hale.

She never took a hot shower. She had no indoor plumbing. No electricity. No refrigeration. When she was sick, there were no antibiotics, no modern surgery, no anesthesia for most of her life. She lost her husband young—in an era when that often meant poverty. Childhood mortality was common. A simple infection could be fatal.

And yet, she spent seventeen years asking a nation to pause and be thankful.

• • •

Those consumer sentiment surveys measure how people feel—and feelings are real. I don't dismiss them. Economic anxiety is legitimate, and some people are genuinely hurting.

But perspective matters.

We have tools, comforts, and medical care that would have seemed miraculous to Sarah Hale. We can talk to loved ones across the world in an instant. We have access to more knowledge, more opportunity, and more abundance than any generation in human history.

Gratitude isn't denial of problems. It's recognition of what we have alongside what we lack. Sarah understood something important: thanksgiving isn't a feeling that arrives when circumstances are perfect. It's a practice that sustains us through difficulty.

• • •

This Thursday, when we gather around tables with family and friends, we're participating in a tradition that exists because one persistent woman believed it mattered.

She believed gratitude could hold a divided nation together.

Maybe she was onto something.

Happy Thanksgiving.