You may be surprised to learn that the person most responsible for Thanksgiving becoming a national holiday wasn’t a Pilgrim. She never set foot on the Mayflower. She was a widowed mom of five named Sarah Josepha Hale, and her story is one every Christian family needs to hear because it didn’t come out of abundance. It came out of grief.
Sarah Hale’s Story: A Widow’s Journey of Faith
Sarah married a young attorney named David Hale in 1813. He encouraged her writing and tutored her in the evenings, and they were building a real life together. Then, while she was pregnant with their fifth child, David caught pneumonia and died suddenly. Just like that, Sarah was thirty-four, widowed, and raising five kids on her own.
She tried opening a hat shop first. It didn’t work out. So she turned to the one thing she’d been quietly good at since childhood: writing. Her mother had homeschooled her, and her brother used to share his Dartmouth textbooks so she could learn alongside him. That early education became her lifeline. She began publishing poems and stories, and eventually became editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most-read magazine in America at the time, reaching an amazing 150,000 households a month. I’m sure you remember one of her poems, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Sarah would have had every right to use that platform on bitterness, or just to keep her family afloat. Instead, she spent the next few decades on one quiet, stubborn campaign: getting the United States to set aside a single day, every year, just to give thanks to God. I believe it was God’s will promoting her.
Sarah Hale’s 17-Year Fight for a National Thanksgiving Day
She wrote to five presidents. Four said no. She kept writing anyway for seventeen years, insisting that a nation as blessed and as divided as hers (just as it is today) needed one shared day to say thank you to God. She believed gratitude wasn’t just a nice feeling. But it was strong enough to help heal a broken country.
Then, in September 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, she wrote one more letter. This time to Abraham Lincoln. Five days later, he issued the Thanksgiving Proclamation, setting the last Thursday of November aside as a National Day of Thanksgiving and prayer. A widow who had every reason to stop believing gratitude changed anything ended up giving a grieving, divided nation a permanent reason to thank God together.
What Sarah Hale Teaches Us About Thanksgiving Gratitude
Sarah Hale’s Thanksgiving wasn’t a cozy Norman Rockwell painting. It came out of real loss. That’s exactly why it’s worth telling around your own table this year. Gratitude isn’t just for families whose lives look easy right now. It’s something we can choose in the middle of hardship, and Scripture doesn’t just suggest this, it commands it: “give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18). Not just the comfortable ones. That’s my favorite go-to verse because it lifts me up when the devil tries to bring me down.
Christian Thanksgiving Traditions: Father, Son, and Spirit
Honor God the Father — the Giver behind every gift. Before the meal, go around the table and have everyone name one specific thing from this past year they didn’t earn or expect — a job, a healing, a friendship that came out of nowhere. James 1:17 calls these “good and perfect” gifts straight from the Father. Write them on paper and create a “harvest basket,” and let the kids keep it up through Advent as a reminder.
Honor Jesus the Son — the reason we can approach God at all. It’s easy for Thanksgiving to turn into gratitude aimed at no one in particular. Include Jesus. Read Luke 17:11-19, the ten lepers Jesus healed, and the one who came back to say thank you. Ask honestly: which of the nine are we most like on a normal day? Then thank Jesus by name for one specific way He’s changed your family this year.
Honor the Holy Spirit — the One who actually produces gratitude in us. Thankfulness itself is fruit of the Spirit’s work (Galatians 5:22-23), not something we just muster up by trying harder. Pray together and ask the Spirit to grow specific gratitude in each person for the year ahead. It turns Thanksgiving from just looking backward into a real prayer for what God wants to grow in the future.
Sarah Hale’s family’s loss became the seed of a whole nation’s habit of thanking God. This year let’s go a little deeper and name not just the blessings but the Father, Son, and Spirit standing behind every one of them.
—Lee Ann Mancini is the author of Raising Kids to Follow Christ: Instilling a Lifelong Trust in God, founder of Raising Christian Kids, adjunct professor at South Florida Bible College &
Theological Seminary, and executive producer of the
animated series Sea Kids on Right Now Media,
Pure Flix, Answers.tv, Minno, and Yippee
