Poem of the Day: ‘Thanksgiving Day’

There’s a certain annoying type of 19th-century New England woman: a collection of the busybodiest of all the busybodies the world has ever known. And Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) must surely rank among their exemplars. Counting herself a friend of the activist Margaret Fuller (and that in itself is a telling little mark), Child marched through life as a writer, speaker, and complainer, never happy unless she had an evil to fight, a downtrodden population to exhort to greater effort, and a straw man to set on rhetorical fire. The fact that she was often right in her causes — especially abolition — seems almost incidental: a byproduct of her utter conviction of her own correctness, her do-gooderism, and her Puritan inheritance as one of the elect, the most righteous people in the world. Her railings against the entire discipline of theology, for example, are almost too good to be missed. Almost.

But Child also wrote — and allow her the credit she deserves — the best-known Thanksgiving verses in the canon of American poetry: “Over the river and through the wood, / To grandfather’s house we go.” Published in 1844, the poem is about children in a sleigh, heading to Child’s grandparents’ farm near Medford, Massachusetts: “Now grandmother’s cap I spy! / Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done? / Hurrah for the pumpkin-pie!” Set to a melody from an unknown source shortly after its appearance, the lyrics (usually shortened to four stanzas, and sometimes strangely converted to a Christmas song) quickly became an American standard. (Here, for example, is a 2019 rendition by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.) And why not give Lydia Maria Child at least one cheer for that inexplicably charming lapse?