Happy Thanksgiving

On this quintessential American holiday, I offer a station break to the other American pastime of endless “Black Friday” marketing. Today we celebrate the story of America with a holiday that purportedly celebrates a one-time celebration after the first hard year in Plymouth Colony.

The settlers of Plymouth Colony had fled without fishhooks, and knowledge about farming. They were very, very grateful that the indigenous Wampanoag people were neighborly and helped them out by teaching them to survive. They held a celebration with the Wampanoag marking that first year. This was, at least the story, a reenactor told me at a visit to the former Plimoth Plantation, as part of their living history program.

Plymouth Colony was founded by what we now call Pilgrims who set out on the Mayflower, to flee religious oppression. England, at the time, was figuring out what to do with religion after King Henry VIII renounced the Roman Catholic Church and created the Church of England. After removing the whole no-divorce clause and clashing with Pope Clement VII, Henry loosely based his Church of England on the Protestant Reformation brought to you by Martin Luther. Luther started this reform by cranking up the social media of the day, the Gutenberg Press and printing viral copies of a declaration. Luther’s famous declaration was a listicle of the 95 reasons why indulgences were bad for you. Indulgences were what Catholic priests could offer as kind of a pay for play in the Renaissance whereby you could confess to something sinful, and then buy a get of purgatory card.

The Pilgrims wanted to avoid all this hierarchy and payoffs and opted to separate from the Church of England and administer their own worshipping ways. Naturally, the Church of England did not like these wayward tendencies and so to avoid the burning at the stake retribution, did what refugees do when they don’t want to get arrested and die, they went somewhere else.

Somehow the Puritans found out about all this cheap land and decided that they too would come to this new world. The Puritans wanted to disrupt the real estate business of England and create a very strict religious experience. So they set sail to the new world in higher numbers (10 Puritans for every Pilgrim) and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 

Since I live in New England, my local City Hall in Norwalk, offers a mural depicting life in New England a short time afterward. Roger Ludlow, a Puritan, is depicted performing the traditional actions defining the primary industry of Connecticut— the real estate transaction. You can tell Ludlow was a Puritan because he’s wearing black. Not depicted was the scandal that he was in the hot seat for accusing his neighbor of being a witch. He also created a whole bunch of laws about things not to do, or risk being burned at the stake. His popularity, even amongst Puritans, was waning, but he had high hopes for the real estate deal.

Thanksgiving, as we know it, wasn’t officially declared a national holiday until Abraham Lincoln declared it in an attempt to bring unity in 1863. Up to that point, states’s rights meant a confusing mishmash of celebratory days of either fasting, following the original Puritan rejection of all Catholic holidays, or harvest feasts following an agrarian tradition.

Our myth of the first Thanksgiving is enmeshed in cultural lore that commingled the Puritans and the Pilgrims.  For much of 20th century history lessons, the story of the first Thanksgiving was a very simplified version of how this cornucopia of food celebration was the keystone to the foundation of America. 

It didn’t cover how it was the Puritans who triumphed over the Pilgrims, whom they viewed as hedonistic nonconformists. The Puritans believed in the Church of England and the reformation of the Catholic Church and were very establishment. The Pilgrims were the insurgents who formed a friendship with the Wampanoag people who famously gave us the famous feast of Thanksgiving. The Puritans waged war with all native peoples they encountered because it turns out that they spent a lot of time yelling at Indigenous people to get off of their lawns because of maps and such. 

History is often written by the vanquishers and not the vanquished, which results in a one-sided story of how things really happened. Every once in a while, it gets updated to reflect the current cultural jargon, and things get lost in translation like I did here. 

But we shouldn’t lose sight of the difference between the Pilgrims who embraced their new homeland and the people they encountered, and the Puritans who just wanted to take over land and dictate in exacting detail what all people could or could not do on a daily basis. 

So as you sit around the Thanksgiving table this year, maybe eating the bird Ben Franklin preferred as the symbol of the United States of America,  think about those Pilgrims. They believed in being grateful, friendly, and kind to all people. Don’t think of those harsh Puritans who valued land over people, war over peace, and introduced the large shoe buckle as a fashion trend.

Happy Thanksgiving!