This from the WSJ.
Covid will not stop Americans from embracing their annual Thanksgiving traditions involving charity, family, faith, food and football. And they might want to consider adding a new tradition this year as they gather around the dinner table—sharing a few passages from our former colleague Melanie Kirkpatrick’s delightful 2016 book, “Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience.”
What may seem shocking to some and inspiring to many is that the Pilgrims were even in a mood to give thanks when they gathered for that first special feast 399 years ago. As Ms. Kirkpatrick notes, their recent experience had been brutal:
All together, only half of the men, women, and children who had sailed on the Mayflower were still alive a year after landing in the New World. Many fell victim to an illness that scholars theorize was a virulent form of influenza. The Pilgrims called it “the great sickness.”
Whatever it was, the weak, poorly nourished settlers started falling ill about two weeks after arriving in Plymouth. Most of the sick were crowded into the small common house that the settlers had managed to construct quickly. But not everyone could fit into it, so others were kept aboard the Mayflower, anchored in Plymouth Harbor... The few people who stayed well had to prepare the food, get the water, and care for the sick.
Yet by the late summer or early autumn of 1621 they were gathering “with grateful hearts to celebrate their first harvest in the New World,” notes the author. The feast of course included generous participants from the Wampanoag tribe. In the years to come there would be violent strife between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans, but the event in 1621 was one of harmony. Ms. Kirkpatrick describes the event:
There are two eyewitness accounts of the First Thanksgiving. William Bradford, Plymouth’s longtime governor, penned one. Edward Winslow is the author of the other... As described by the two Pilgrim leaders, the event that Americans have come to call the First Thanksgiving was remarkably similar to the holiday we mark today. There was feasting and game playing, and an all-round mood of good cheer.
In their separate accounts, Bradford and Winslow each make much of the bounty on hand in New England, an abundance that presages the dining tables at modern-day Thanksgiving dinners. Bradford tells of the “great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many.” He also notes the “cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store.”Winslow offers an anecdote about the rich natural resources of the American continent that would have wowed his readers back in England. The governor dispatched a shooting party for the occasion, he writes, and the four Pilgrims killed enough birds in one day to serve the community for almost a week.It is from Winslow that we learn that a large group of Wampanoag warriors joined the Pilgrim feast. In telling how the Pilgrims welcomed the Wampanoag to their celebration, Winslow homes in on other attributes of the holiday, then and now: hospitality, generosity, neighborliness... The Wampanoags’ “greatest king Massasoit” and his men “went out and killed five deer,” which they “bestowed on our Governor [Bradford], and upon the Captain [Myles Standish] and others.”...The central similarity between the First Thanksgiving and today’s holiday is something less tangible: the spirit of thankfulness. From the first, as Bradford and Winslow imply, Thanksgiving has been a time to stop and take stock of the blessings enjoyed by family and community. As the English settlers overcame the trials they faced that first year in Plymouth, qualities that Americans have come to honor as integral to our national identity were on full display: courage, perseverance, diligence, piety. These are the virtues that helped to shape the American character.The Pilgrims displayed another virtue, one they practiced every day and which stood at the heart of the First Thanksgiving. Cicero called it the greatest of the virtues and the parent of all the rest: gratitude.
love this! Posting the link!
Posted by: maria | Thursday, November 26, 2020 at 05:09 AM