A Thanksgiving history lesson for all. HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL!
With thanks to a good friend D. Aird for sending it to me.
Over the River &
Through the Woods
It’s the only popular song written about Thanksgiving.
Its history is just as unique...
Over the River and Through
the Woods
by Thomas Fleming
New York, New York
Think of a Thanksgiving song. A few hymns come to mind: “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessings,” or “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come.” By far the most popular tune is “Over the River and Through the Wood.” Hum a few bars and you’re on a sleigh hurtling over white and drifted snow. Visit Medford, Massachusetts, and you can see the very bridge that goes over that river. But can you name the author of those enduring lyrics? Few can, and yet she was one of the most remarkable American women of the nineteenth century.
Lydia Maria Child was born in Medford in 1802. Maria, as she preferred to be called, was the youngest of seven children of a baker. It is said that her mother set out a groaning board of pies and puddings on Thanksgiving Eve and invited the poor. Certainly that feast served as an inspiration for Maria’s later verses. It also must have inspired her lifelong passion for the less fortunate.
Her first book, written at age 22, was a historical novel—the first published in the United States—the story of a Native American brave and a colonial New England girl. Maria’s fame spread. She went on to write a second novel and start the country’s first magazine for children, Juvenile Miscellany.
Her interests took a more serious turn after her marriage in 1828 to David Lee Child, an idealistic Boston lawyer. On the Fourth of July in 1829 David attended a speech by William Lloyd Garrison denouncing slavery and demanding its immediate abolition. Moved, David became one of the first members of Garrison’s New England Anti–Slavery Society.
Maria disapproved of slavery, but the demand for immediate abolition struck her as radical. She changed her mind after meeting the charismatic Garrison. “He got hold of the strings of my conscience,” she explained to a friend.
Maria’s next book was a full-length attack on the evils of slavery. Bostonians were outraged because she pointed out that some of the city’s largest fortunes had been built on the slave trade. Maria found herself shunned by old friends, sales of her books slumped and her children’s magazine was forced to close down. One member of the venerable literary association the Boston Athenaeum hurled her antislavery book out the window, using a pair of tongs to avoid touching it.
“I am aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken,” Maria wrote, “but though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not in my nature to fear them.”
She wrote a second book on the subject, then joined her husband in a project aimed at reducing the profits of slaveholders. David bought a farm in Northampton, Massachusetts, and began raising sugar beets. The sugar would be sold as a substitute for the cane sugar produced by slave labor in the South.
The experiment was beset with problems. The Childs spent the next three years living on the edge of poverty. Maria took a job in New York as editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. She supplemented her salary by writing short stories and magazine articles. It was during this period in the mid 1840s that she wrote “The New–England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day.”
Living in New York, far from her husband, she must have found it comforting to imagine the dapple gray leading the sleigh over that familiar bridge and through the woods to a feast like her mother’s. Through the magic of her pen, Maria could reminisce about the holiday as it was celebrated in her native New England. The lyrics were set to music and her words were then sung by children all over the country who had never even heard of pumpkin pie, heretofore a strictly regional delicacy.
The abolitionist movement grew. When Maria learned of John Brown’s misbegotten attempt at a slave uprising in 1859, she wrote to the governor of Virginia asking to be allowed to visit Brown in prison to dress his wounds. The governor made the request public, and she was deluged with angry letters.
One letter, from the wife of a Virginia senator, defended slavery as a benevolent institution. Southern women, she noted, were kind to slaves when they gave birth. Maria responded with an acerbic letter in which she pointed out that northern women were also kind to women in childbirth, but “after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies.”
The correspondence was published as a pamphlet and sold 300,000 copies. With the advent of the Civil War, Maria helped an ex-slave, Harriet Jacobs, publish her memoirs and later edited an anthology of prominent African-American writers. All the while, her Thanksgiving song was still being sung. In fact, the very idea of a national day of thanksgiving was becoming more popular.
At the end of 1863, a year of bitter losses for both North and South at Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chancellorsville, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for a national holiday “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.” A time for families to make that trek over a battle-scarred land to give thanks to God.
Maria died in 1880 knowing that her battles had not been in vain. Today, little of her antislavery writing is remembered, but we still sing her lyrics, even if our sleighs are now cars and airplanes. And at the end of the journey we bow our heads in prayer to the source of our bounty and the freedoms for which Maria fought. Or, as she wrote, “Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day!”
The above article originally appeared in the November 2003 issue of Guideposts Magazine.
About Lydia Maria Child
Lydia Maria Child - A Boy's Thanksgiving Day
Over the River and Through the Wood - Lydia Maria Child
Over the River and
Through the Woods
Written By: Lydia Maria Child
Music By: Unknown
Over the river and through the woods
To Grandmother's house we go
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
Through white and drifted snow
Over the river and through the woods
Oh how the wind does blow
It stings the toes and bites the nose
As over the ground we go
Over the river and through the woods
To have a full day of play
Oh, hear the bells ringing ting a ling ling
For it is Christmas Day
Over the river and through the woods
Trot fast my dapple gray
Spring o'er the ground just like a hound
For this is Christmas Day
Over the river and through the woods
And straight through the barn yard gate
It seems that we go so dreadfully slow
It is so hard to wait
Over the river and through the woods
Now Grandma's cap I spy
Hurrah for fun the pudding's done
Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!
Over the River &
Through the Woods
It’s the only popular song written about Thanksgiving.
Its history is just as unique...
Over the River and Through
the Woods
by Thomas Fleming
New York, New York
Think of a Thanksgiving song. A few hymns come to mind: “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessings,” or “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come.” By far the most popular tune is “Over the River and Through the Wood.” Hum a few bars and you’re on a sleigh hurtling over white and drifted snow. Visit Medford, Massachusetts, and you can see the very bridge that goes over that river. But can you name the author of those enduring lyrics? Few can, and yet she was one of the most remarkable American women of the nineteenth century.
Lydia Maria Child was born in Medford in 1802. Maria, as she preferred to be called, was the youngest of seven children of a baker. It is said that her mother set out a groaning board of pies and puddings on Thanksgiving Eve and invited the poor. Certainly that feast served as an inspiration for Maria’s later verses. It also must have inspired her lifelong passion for the less fortunate.
Her first book, written at age 22, was a historical novel—the first published in the United States—the story of a Native American brave and a colonial New England girl. Maria’s fame spread. She went on to write a second novel and start the country’s first magazine for children, Juvenile Miscellany.
Her interests took a more serious turn after her marriage in 1828 to David Lee Child, an idealistic Boston lawyer. On the Fourth of July in 1829 David attended a speech by William Lloyd Garrison denouncing slavery and demanding its immediate abolition. Moved, David became one of the first members of Garrison’s New England Anti–Slavery Society.
Maria disapproved of slavery, but the demand for immediate abolition struck her as radical. She changed her mind after meeting the charismatic Garrison. “He got hold of the strings of my conscience,” she explained to a friend.
Maria’s next book was a full-length attack on the evils of slavery. Bostonians were outraged because she pointed out that some of the city’s largest fortunes had been built on the slave trade. Maria found herself shunned by old friends, sales of her books slumped and her children’s magazine was forced to close down. One member of the venerable literary association the Boston Athenaeum hurled her antislavery book out the window, using a pair of tongs to avoid touching it.
“I am aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken,” Maria wrote, “but though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not in my nature to fear them.”
She wrote a second book on the subject, then joined her husband in a project aimed at reducing the profits of slaveholders. David bought a farm in Northampton, Massachusetts, and began raising sugar beets. The sugar would be sold as a substitute for the cane sugar produced by slave labor in the South.
The experiment was beset with problems. The Childs spent the next three years living on the edge of poverty. Maria took a job in New York as editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. She supplemented her salary by writing short stories and magazine articles. It was during this period in the mid 1840s that she wrote “The New–England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day.”
Living in New York, far from her husband, she must have found it comforting to imagine the dapple gray leading the sleigh over that familiar bridge and through the woods to a feast like her mother’s. Through the magic of her pen, Maria could reminisce about the holiday as it was celebrated in her native New England. The lyrics were set to music and her words were then sung by children all over the country who had never even heard of pumpkin pie, heretofore a strictly regional delicacy.
The abolitionist movement grew. When Maria learned of John Brown’s misbegotten attempt at a slave uprising in 1859, she wrote to the governor of Virginia asking to be allowed to visit Brown in prison to dress his wounds. The governor made the request public, and she was deluged with angry letters.
One letter, from the wife of a Virginia senator, defended slavery as a benevolent institution. Southern women, she noted, were kind to slaves when they gave birth. Maria responded with an acerbic letter in which she pointed out that northern women were also kind to women in childbirth, but “after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies.”
The correspondence was published as a pamphlet and sold 300,000 copies. With the advent of the Civil War, Maria helped an ex-slave, Harriet Jacobs, publish her memoirs and later edited an anthology of prominent African-American writers. All the while, her Thanksgiving song was still being sung. In fact, the very idea of a national day of thanksgiving was becoming more popular.
At the end of 1863, a year of bitter losses for both North and South at Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chancellorsville, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for a national holiday “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.” A time for families to make that trek over a battle-scarred land to give thanks to God.
Maria died in 1880 knowing that her battles had not been in vain. Today, little of her antislavery writing is remembered, but we still sing her lyrics, even if our sleighs are now cars and airplanes. And at the end of the journey we bow our heads in prayer to the source of our bounty and the freedoms for which Maria fought. Or, as she wrote, “Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day!”
The above article originally appeared in the November 2003 issue of Guideposts Magazine.
About Lydia Maria Child
Lydia Maria Child - A Boy's Thanksgiving Day
Over the River and Through the Wood - Lydia Maria Child
Over the River and
Through the Woods
Written By: Lydia Maria Child
Music By: Unknown
Over the river and through the woods
To Grandmother's house we go
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
Through white and drifted snow
Over the river and through the woods
Oh how the wind does blow
It stings the toes and bites the nose
As over the ground we go
Over the river and through the woods
To have a full day of play
Oh, hear the bells ringing ting a ling ling
For it is Christmas Day
Over the river and through the woods
Trot fast my dapple gray
Spring o'er the ground just like a hound
For this is Christmas Day
Over the river and through the woods
And straight through the barn yard gate
It seems that we go so dreadfully slow
It is so hard to wait
Over the river and through the woods
Now Grandma's cap I spy
Hurrah for fun the pudding's done
Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!
posted by Crestwood Independent at 06:11
5 Comments:
I love the song. I love the holiday, with family, friends, and a wonderful feast. But the song clearly talks about Christmas, not Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving Tom to your and yours and to all the readers of the Crestwood Independent.
(and anyone else I may have missed)
10:43 AM Blogger: Kerra, I think it was written as a dual holiday song, but I wasn't there for another three years, so....
Happy Thanksgiving!
Tom Ford
And to you! May we all have enough turkey and stuffing to have us on the couch for hours! And may we all be grateful for every mouthful.
3:52 PM Blogger: Kerra, Amen, and may you and your family have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
And when your day is done, If you have the time, please join me in one last look back for our fallen hero's who gave us the Freedom to enjoy this wonderful Holiday.
Tom Ford
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