Thanksgiving The Real Celebration: The True Story November 2006

by Don Huntington
Images by R. Byrne & Brad Shifflett

Thankfulness is one of the main qualities any truly happy and fulfilled person will possess. A few decades before the birth of Christ the philosopher, Cicero, made a profound observation: “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”

According to Cicero, if I don’t have gratitude in my heart, neither can I have genuine love. If Cicero was right, then peace will never thrive in a soil not fertilized by thankfulness. An ungrateful heart will find no place for joy. There is no gentleness in a man or woman who is not appreciative.

Joahannes A. Gaertner, in a book called Worldly Virtues, wrote the words:

To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant,
to enact gratitude is generous and noble,
to live gratitude is to touch heaven.

Most of us, if we thought about it, would acknowledge that living a life marked by gratitude is a good way to live.

Our American calendars contain one special day that is given to encouraging this most wonderful of all virtues. Thanksgiving Day is one of the main holidays of the year. Businesses, schools, and government offices close down for the professed purpose of giving everyone an opportunity to gather with family and friends and to acknowledge thankfulness for the gifts that we have been given.

Celebrating Thanksgiving
Many of us who were raised in America have fond memories of Thanksgiving Days we celebrated in the past. I remember as a young person that I would look forward with longing to Thanksgiving because starting with that Thursday morning and during the subsequent five weeks I would have more vacation days free from school than during any other period of the year except for summer vacation. So when Thanksgiving rolled around, I never had to pretend to a thankfulness I didn’t really feel in my heart.

Americans are raised with a shared cultural memory concerning the highlights of the First Thanksgiving. We remember the story of how the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620 on the good ship Mayflower. The ship left England on August 1, 1620, and after a terrible trip of more than three months, they finally anchored off Cape Cod November 21.

The passengers were seeking religious freedom in the New World. They established The Plymouth Colony as one of the first beachheads of Western Civilization in America. Following a severe winter, the Pilgrims planted crops, and after gathering in their first harvest, they joined together with the local Native Americans for a meal that became the basis for our Thanksgiving Day holiday.

The point of the dinner was to celebrate the harvest and prove to the Pilgrims and Indians that they could live together in peace.

Well, that’s the story we all know. But how much of that is really true? What really happened? The answers are amazing.

The Pilgrimage
The Pilgrims were composed, for the most part, of representatives from a group called the Separatists. They had begun their pilgrimage 11 years earlier leaving Holland to immigrate to England. That didn’t work out for them so they imagined that in America they could find the freedom that had escaped them in England.

The Pilgrims were a relatively young group. Their average age was only 32. The oldest passenger on the Mayflower, a man named James Chilton, was only 64. At least 30 passengers were under the age of 17. Fifty-one passengers were male, 20 were female.

The Pilgrims didn’t really come to America seeking religious freedom, as we would understand it today. They came from Europe as a way of separating themselves completely from the state church that dominated each European country.

Pilgrims were technically different than Puritans. They didn’t want to purify the church; they wanted to separate from it. They hoped to find in the New World a congenial environment for the standards of belief and practice that had been rejected in the Old.

The Pilgrims actually wanted to find a place where they could impose the same kind of domination with their Puritan-type beliefs as the mainstream Christian churches exercised in the countries they were fleeing. The Pilgrims were similar in some ways to Puritans, but dressed in more fine clothes, for example. The black clothes, hats, and buckles that we are familiar with didn’t come as a style until later.

The Pilgrims were fundamentalists who imposed a rigid system of behaviors upon their people. They were intolerant of anybody who failed to conform to their standards of thought and behavior. Fortunately, the forces of toleration and openness that were always present in the community eventually won out over the more rigid attitudes.

The Wampanoag Indians who populated nearby areas when the Pilgrims arrived had a different system of beliefs, of course. Fortunately, their religious beliefs taught them to be charitable and to help those who came to them in need.

November was a bad time of the year to try to found a new civilization in New England. Governor Bradford wrote in his journal that they had landed in a barren and desolate wilderness. There were no friends to greet him, he said, and no houses to give them shelter, nor inns where they could find accommodation out of the weather.

The first winter the Pilgrims spent in the New World turned out to be the final winter for the majority of them. Of the original 102 settlers who came to America on that first trip, only 46 were alive when spring rolled around. The rest had died of starvation, sickness, or exposure — or from some combination of all three. Governor Bradford, himself, buried his wife during that first winter.

Revisionists have claimed that the Pilgrims stole the land from the Indians, but the fact is that the land was uninhabited when the Pilgrims arrived. The original inhabitants, called the Patuxet, had been completely wiped out two years earlier by smallpox that had been planted by a slave ship that had visited the area.

Squanto was the only Patuxet Indian to survive. He did so because he was in England when the plague broke out. Squanto became the Plymouth Colony’s interpreter and acted as mediator between the colonists and the nearest confederation of tribes consisting of Massasoit and the Wampanoag confederation of tribes.

Squanto also taught the Pilgrims important lessons about living off the land including planting corn, which none of the settlers had ever seen before, using dead fish for fertilizer, and methods of hunting the deer that ran wild throughout New England in those years. Governor Bradford acknowledged the help that Squanto provided and noted that he was “a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectations.

It took a few years before the Pilgrims were able to lift themselves to genuine prosperity. Hardships persisted because the original Plymouth Contract that they had created during the voyage on the Mayflower contained a provision setting up what was, in effect, America’s first socialized economy.

The initial goal of the Pilgrims was to share everything in common. The system, which has never worked well, let those early settlers down especially hard. Governor Bradford later made the dolorous comment about the failed communistic experiment:

The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; and that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.

As soon as capitalism and private property was initiated, the economy took off and a great wave of prosperity came to the settlers.

The First Thanksgiving
Nobody knows for sure when the first Thanksgiving actually took place. It was probably sometime in October. The first Thanksgiving Day actually lasted for three days. The Indians brought food so the event, in effect, turned out to be America’s first potluck dinner. The oldest Mayflower passenger still alive to partake in the first Thanksgiving was a man named William Brewster, who was 54.

Surprisingly, only two people who attended that first Thanksgiving ever published any notes about the event. One of the pilgrims, Edward Winslow, wrote an account of the event the next year, December 12, 1621.

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. The four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week…. Many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others…. By the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

Governor William Bradford himself wrote the second description 20 years after the event. His account provided the basis for the story of the Thanksgiving turkey tradition.

They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercising in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached…. And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc.

So turkey probably was served at those first Thanksgiving feasts. Other fowl might have included goose, duck, crane, swan, and partridge. The pilgrims also occasionally ate eagles, which they said tasted like goat meat.

The Thanksgiving feasting was probably much more elaborate than some of us might imagine for a group of people who had only the previous year buried so many people who had starved to death.

Seafood on the dinner table during the first Thanksgiving likely included cod, bass, herring, shad, bluefish, eel, clams, lobsters, mussels, and very small quantities of oysters.

Meat dishes certainly included venison, and they might also have served dishes of chicken and eggs. Side dishes would have been prepared from wheat flour, Indian corn, cornmeal peas, squash, pumpkins, and beans.

Fruits were served including raspberries, strawberries, grapes, plums, cherries, and blueberries.

Libations might have included beer made from barley. The meal would have been followed by walnuts, chestnuts, and hickory nuts.

Dishes would have been flavored by herbs and seasonings including onions, leeks, strawberry leaves, currants, sorrel, yarrow, carvel, brooklime, liverwort, watercress, and flax. They probably had radishes, lettuce, carrots, onions, and cabbage.

Flavorings included apple syrup, honey, butter, and Holland cheese.

So the ingredients available to the Pilgrims on that first Thanksgiving were extensive and sufficiently diverse to provide a menu for a large, complex restaurant.

But some things were missing from the Pilgrim’s storerooms that have been added in the three-and-a-half centuries that have elapsed since that time.

For one thing, we’ve mixed into our modern Thanksgiving tradition the Cornucopia, or Horn of Plenty. This was actually imported from the ancient Greeks, so the Cornucopia actually preceded the Pilgrims by a couple eons, but was not part of the Pilgrim culture nor of American Thanksgiving feasts until more recent times.

Other things were missing from the first Thanksgiving that characterize our modern holiday. Ham, for example, was probably absent. Pigs were not native to America and the Pilgrims probably didn’t bring any on the Mayflower with them.

Also missing from the table were sweet potatoes, which the Pilgrims hadn’t brought with them. There were no mashed potatoes, since the colonists, like everyone else, still considered potatoes to be poisonous.

Corn on the cob was missing, since the native maize wasn’t sweet or soft enough to eat; it was only good for making cornmeal. Nor was it good for popping, so the Pilgrims had no popcorn. Cranberry sauce was missing. There were cranberries in that part of New England, but no sugar.

The Pilgrims boiled pumpkins and made pumpkin puddings, but probably did not make crust for pies.

After Thanksgiving
The ideal of peace didn’t endure. Seventeen years later the Pequot War culminated in the massacre of 700 unarmed Pequot Indians, mostly women and children, who had gathered in the area of what is today Groton, Connecticut for their Green Corn Festival.

And 50 years after that first Thanksgiving, in 1675, the children of the Puritans and Indians from that first Thanksgiving fought in a savage conflict called King Philip’s War. Fighting was so fierce that one out of ten persons, Indians and Europeans, was killed or wounded.

A gap of 442 years separated the first Thanksgiving and the second official Thanksgiving. Through the efforts of a persistent lobbyist named Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, Abraham Lincoln made a Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1863 establishing Thanksgiving as a national holiday. He set it as the last Thursday in November, which sometimes ended up being the fifth Thursday, which was too close to Christmas for some businesses.

It was 76 more years until President Franklin Roosevelt, in 1939, designated Thanksgiving Day as the fourth Thursday of November.

We Do it Our Way
And so the Thanksgiving holiday has come to all of us in America. This year, as we have done every year for the past 143 years, we will gather to mark Thanksgiving Day with family and friends.

Of course, for many of us the holiday has taken on aspects that would completely baffle the people who started the tradition and who carried it on in the earlier times.

For one thing, Thanksgiving Week is one of the most heavily traveled periods of the whole year. What could a person like Sarah Josepha Hale have ever thought about the nonchalant way in which we might travel hundreds or even thousands of miles in a few hours to celebrate the holiday with friends and family that live in distant cities or even in different states? The four-day weekend is sufficiently long for us to get to almost any place on the planet and be back at work on Monday morning.

Nor would Ms. Hale be able to comprehend how some of us might pick up one of those Thanksgiving Dinner Kits that the supermarkets now sell, with the turkey and all the trimmings prepared. We can just pop it in the oven and on the stove and the meal is done without much effort being required.

She certainly wouldn’t be able to understand some of us going out to eat Chinese that day. Or sushi. Or Italian.

Most of all Ms. Hale couldn’t comprehend the millions of American men who will sink groaning onto sofas and easy chairs after putting away an enormous meal, switch on the TV, and spend the rest of the day watching football games, drinking beer, and eating potato chips.

Hopefully, most of us will take at least a few minutes to pause and from sincere hearts filled with gratitude to give thanks to God. Or to Allah, Buddha, the Divine Spirit, or to the Elemental Spirits of the Universe. However we picture the Source of our Being, let’s give thanks together.

Cicero was right. Gratitude really is the parent of all the other virtues and, therefore, one we should earnestly cultivate.

Let’s allow the spirit of Thanksgiving to mark our spirits on Thanksgiving Day and during all the other days that lie before us.°