¨Autumn Holiday¨

Below you will find a transcription from William H. Shaw´s History of Essex and Hudson Counties (1884). The section was titled Autumn Holiday and listed in the chapter dedicated to North Bergen. It is the only reference to the Thanksgiving holiday in the entire book. As a teacher I found the authors perspectives quite interesting, especially with the current proposal to update our town´s schools. Shaw beautifully weaves a picture explaining the purpose of the holiday. What strikes hardest is the emphasis he places on education. To add to the author´s perspective, Shaw lived through and witnessed the horrors of the Civil War, thus valuing education as a way to ensure a lasting time of peace as well as the prosperous growth of the nation. As you sit down with your families today, cherish the time you have together, share family stories, eat, drink and laugh. Be thankful for what you and your family have regardless of how grand or minor, continue in a tradition that all families that called North Bergen home have partaken in. Happy Thanksgiving

Late 1880s Thanksgiving Card

Courtesy of Donna Bello

¨Thanksgiving met with no ordinary celebration under these impressive circumstances. The aggregate of the populace must unite in a rendering of thanks. Without these, this central combination of thought, there is a repleteness of desolation. The tree needs something, the nourisher of its roots. The moon has a centre towards which it gravitates. The earth has a sun to sustain it, to bathe it in its beautiful light and give it warmth. So the intelligent creature derives life from, and renders his annual thanks to, the source of all goodness, the eternal Being, the benign Father. In 1613 a company of traders from Holland established themselves at the site of the present metropolis of which this region is an environ. Happily, with them came ideas in no degree tinctured with superstition. We have the best of evidences going to show the settlers in due time made spiritual matters objects of regard. They were careful to extend and to preserve ¨the blessings of education and religion.¨

The mind within a republic is active. We recognize times for thought and for thankfulness. Intellect was not bestowed to lie dormant: its faculties merit exercise. More people die annually from want of sufficient brain-work than from an excess of it. Many are inclined to to think that it is good to give the mind full play, to expand the powers of thought by reading and observations. A great deal depends upon the mind´s having its full share of activity. In no department is it more sublimely exercised than when invoking favors of heaven. Here it harmonizes with the most renowned of polities early engrafted upon our judicial system, and which marches in the front ranks of human progress. It is a system that bears inscribed upon principles of everlasting fidelity to the recorded laws of God. No public sentiment extant, to any degree noticed here or in our vicinity contravenes these enunciations. Two stanzas of a metrical piece sung in one of the public schools with the township in 1857-58, yield poetic expression to pleasing ideas, -¨

¨May streams of knowledge flow

Throughout the land,

Thus shall the light of life

All minds expand.¨

¨Long live American,

Land of the free:

Firmly stand, freedomś land,

Long life to thee!¨

¨God save America!

Oh, may she be

O´ershadowed evermore

Father, by Thee!¨