The story of our Thanksgiving service

The Origins of St. Stephen's Thanksgiving Day Service

People come from throughout the area to attend St. Stephen's unique Thanksgiving Day service of Morning Prayer, with its distinctive music and instruments, fine preaching, and beautiful altar arrangements. In 2013, Tony Anthony--a parishioner, a writer, and a member of the three-person committee that is sifting through and preserving St. Stephen's archives--wrote this history of the service.

Until 1952, the Thanksgiving Day service at St. Stephen’s seems to have been a relatively straightforward affair, with the appropriate additional prayers from the Book of Common Prayer and the participation of the “regular choir,” sometimes augmented by the “Youth Choir.”

That year the Rev. Reno Harp, by then in his fifth year as rector of St. Stephen’s, made the first changes by incorporating a patriotic element in the service. The processional hymn was “God of Our Fathers,” and as the Chronicle newsletter described it, “at the presentation of the offering the national colors were held before the altar... [and] We sang the second stanza of the National Anthem followed by the Doxology.”

The Chronicle in 1953 for the first time called it “The Festival Thanksgiving Day Service.” That year also marked the introduction of additional musicians, a trumpeter who, according to Marion Bauer Harrison, played a “magical trumpet obligato to the singing of Old Hundredth.” She went on,  “All our feelings of gratitude were summed up in the familiar and beautiful ‘General Thanksgiving’ and were underscored by the joyous postlude, Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary.”

A descriptive note in the November-December Chronicle for 1954 read in part: “When Mr. Harp came to this Parish he found a church with an average concept of the day...the vision of Mr. Harp was the insistence of a glorious expression of our thanks to God in his [sic] Church...”

By 1955, Reno Harp’s vision was beginning to firmly take hold. The Chronicle reported, “The choir, with Granville Munson directing, was at its best singing the glorious Thanksgiving and National Hymns. The music of the trumpet, played by Sergeant Keith Clark of the United States Army Band, combined with the strains of the organ to intensify the beauty of the hymns of praise and thankfulness. To this was added the sweet and happy voices of the junior choir of 50 children...”

The following year Dr. Harp himself was willing to acknowledge that “Thanksgiving Day has become truly a great festival in St. Stephen’s Church.” He went on to say, “one person writing of it this year said ‘It was an exquisite hour...”

While the musical and liturgical enhancements to Thanksgiving Day that Reno Harp introduced were certainly the most obvious reasons the service became so special, apparently there was another factor. Very soon after his arrival at St. Stephen’s, Dr. Harp’s sermons for the Thanksgiving service were apparently not ordinary. Anonymous writers in the Chronicle would describe them as “compelling” and “inspirational.” So much so that even before the music and pageantry came along, the service was already standing room only.

Recent music directors at St. Stephen’s have gone beyond that first solo trumpeter and organ to include what amounts to a brass chamber orchestra with tympani, and impressive choral arrangements. But 60 years after Reno Harp’s transformation of the Thanksgiving service, his basic vision remains very much alive, establishing a tradition for families of St. Stephen’s, and offering a joyous beginning to the holiday season for many others.