Thanksgiving and Chrsitmas
Thanksgiving started as a floating holiday. The original Puritan settlers on eastern Long Island observed thankgivings—plural—for such things as good harvests or the safe arrival of ships with provisions. Rather than Old World dishes such as boar’s heads and plum pudding, the Long Islanders, like their neighbors in New England, cheerfully made do with turkey and pumpkin—fortunately for us.
George Washington and other early presidents designated individual thanksgiving days. It fell to Abraham Lincoln to establish the annual national holiday we know. Every president since has issued a Thanksgiving Day proclamation.
Even into the 1900s, holidays in the Hamptons remained homey affairs, closer to those of the area’s early settlers than to our own time. A Southampton memoir recalls Christmas from a century ago with a family picking cranberries in Napeague (then a long trip) and shelling and popping corn from their village farm. The best berries and corn kernels were strung to hang on the tree, which had been cut along with laurel branches in the Cedar Swamp woodlands. Buckets of water and sand stood at the ready in case the wax candles clipped to the tree branches started a fire.
Holiday customs are slow to change. The trees and lights along our Main Streets have been the same for generations—except when East Hampton changed from blue to multicolored bulbs a couple of decades ago. The lights on the single tree placed in the shallow waters of Town Pond remain blue however—a gesture, I suppose, to those of us who objected to tampering with holiday tradition at all.
Memorial Day
The monument on Main Street in Bridgehampton village honors Bridgehampton residents and their descendents who died in our nation’s wars. Erected in 1910, when the village was observing its 250th anniversary, it originally commemorated the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and the War of 1812. Names from World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War were—unfortunately and unhappily—added later.
First Resort
Contrary to what you may have heard, the first English settlers (who crossed from Massachusetts in 1640) did not exclaim, “At last, a summer playground for the rich.” Coming from a Puritan tradition, their interests were considerably more humble: farming, fishing, family, religion, and a bit of trade. Until the railroad arrived in the 1870s the Hamptons would have been indistinguishable from simple coastal towns in New England. As recently as 25 years ago, the village main streets had the usual mix of small town shops with barely a boutique or luxury goods store.
Summer colonies, small enclaves of wealthy seasonal residents, were established in the late nineteenth century in what are now the estate areas of Southampton and East Hampton. Artists, with a freer, more bohemian lifestyle began converting barns and outbuildings into studios. But it was not until the prosperity following the Second World War—and the construction of the Long Island Expressway—that the evolution of the Hamptons into a true residential resort began.
History is still with us: the summer colonies, the artists, and although reduced, farming and fishing. The more Puritan aspects of life, however, didn’t stand a chance.