Thanksgiving Miscellany
Thanksgiving: History
and Miscellany
An Adult Formation Presentation
The Personal
Thanksgiving is weird. It’s both Church and State,
history and myth.
It has become the placeholder between Halloween and Christmas.
Nobody quite knows what to do with it: too religious for
the secular, & vv.
As a kid, I did not particularly enjoy Thanksgiving, but
it improves with age.
Thanksgiving is feasting, family, gratitude—and resistant
to commercialization!
Everything in this picture is wrong. Except that it's outside.
The Traditional
The Pilgrims came over in 1620 seeking personal and
religious freedom.
They wrote the Mayflower Compact and settled in Plymouth Colony.
Their survival depended upon Squanto and the Pokanoket
sachem Massasoit.
The First Thanksgiving was a 1621 feast giving thanks for
their survival.
Pilgrim and Indian alike lived together in peace, for 50
years or so at least.
Behold! Colors!
The Actual
How did Thanksgiving become our national founding myth?
Who were the Pilgrims and the Puritans? From what were
they fleeing?
Why were they able to settle where they did, and why did Indians
help them?
They Knew They Were
Pilgrims
Puritans represented the extreme Calvinist Reformation in
England.
They believed the Church of England to be (hopelessly?)
corrupt.
King James, a Protestant, promised to “harry them out of
the land.”
Puritans wanted to purify the CoE, while Separatists
wanted to leave it.
A group first moved from Yorkshire to Leiden in the Netherlands.
Leiden was actually too free! They left again for the Virginia
Colony.
Not exactly wilderness types.
But They Didn’t Know
What They Were Doing
These were townsfolk, not skilled agriculturalists or
colonists.
They got bilked and betrayed several times in their
attempts to leave.
The company financing the venture wanted to ensure
profitability.
Less than half of The
Mayflower’s Passengers were Separatists or Saints.
The rest were Strangers.
From National Geographic's Saints & Strangers (2015)
Stranger in a Strange
Land
Stephen Hopkins is the most interesting Pilgrim you’ve never heard of.
In 1609, The Sea Flower
shipwrecked on Bermuda en route to Jamestown.
Hopkins called for a democratic vote and was nearly
hanged for his trouble.
Later rescued, Hopkins’ adventure became the basis for Shakespeare’s
Tempest.
In 1620, Hopkins was the only Pilgrim with experience in the
Americas.
He was a linguist, a fighter, and a good man to have with
you in a scrape.
I ain't getting hanged again.
The Mayflower Compact
Off course and low on beer, The Mayflower lands above the Hudson.
This is outside the boundaries of their charter, murky
legal waters.
Hopkins has sung this song before—this time we must know
who’s in charge.
The Mayflower Compact, through brief, is a democratic
milestone in America.
The Geneva Bible and the Magna Carta gave Puritans all
the ammo they needed.
No-one knows the initial population. Most agree that 90% died.
The Great Dying:
1616-1619
In earlier records, Europeans found the East Coast
teeming with people.
The Pilgrims found open land, cleared fields, and
abandoned villages.
Where had all the people gone? In a word: plague.
Centuries of accrued European diseases unintentionally ravaged
the New World.
The Pilgrims thought of it as God’s Providence, clearing
a space for them.
Here would be the City on a Hill. “Come over and help us!”
I'm not calling him the devil. He called himself the devil. Sort of.
The Devil Comes to
Plymouth
Tisquantum had been a Patuxet Indian from Cape Cod Bay.
Captured by English, taken to Europe, trained by monks,
he eventually escaped.
But he returned home only to find his village wiped out,
and Pilgrims there.
Tisquantum—Squanto—used his language skills to plan the
rebirth of his tribe.
Tisquantum means, roughly, “devil,” and he lived with Stephen
Hopkins.
Massasoit, sachem of the much-diminished Pokanoket, didn’t
trust Squanto.
He had his own translator, and his own reasons for
allying with the English.
They kept the Pilgrims alive to use them against their
own Native enemies.
The First Un-Thanksgiving
More than half the Pilgrims died within that first year:
disease, cold, starvation.
1621 brought with it a harvest festival for the 50
survivors. 90 Indians show up.
They feast for three days on fowls, venison, and fish,
play games, go shooting.
This is not a “thanksgiving.” Calvinists have spontaneous
feast and fast days.
The feast days (thanksgivings) are spent almost entirely
in worship.
This harvest festival is not a thanksgiving and wasn’t
claimed as such until 1841.
Seems we've always liked guns and sportsball.
How Did Not-Thanksgiving
Become Thanksgiving?
Thanksgiving and fast days were to be spontaneous,
remember. No holidays.
But later generations prospered and got a bit lax with
the rules.
New England Thanksgivings became annual events following
the harvest.
This is largely unrelated to presidential thanksgiving proclamations.
This regular harvest feast Thanksgiving was basically Christmas
for Puritans.
Most of our holiday traditions seem to come from the 19th century. No, really.
From Regional to National
In 1863, Sarah Joseph Hale convinced Lincoln to make Thanksgiving
Federal.
A nation divided by Civil War needed a founding myth to
unify it.
There were other “First Thanksgivings,” but these were Spanish
and Catholic.
Southerners groused that this proved the victory of the New
England Empire.
It took a while for Thanksgiving to take hold, but
eventually it did.
We chose this as our founding story. What does that mean
for who we want to be?
And I'm hoping to read Marooned by Joseph Kelly
Recommended Reading
Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick
Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell
Thanksgiving, James W. Baker
First Thanksgiving, Robert T. McKenzie
Here Shall I Die Ashore, Caleb Johnson
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