The fourth Thursday in November is Thanksgiving Day, the most traditional and heartfelt celebration in the United States. Thanksgiving is one of those things that are deeply rooted in the collective imagination, even though it has nothing to do with our culture and we have only seen it celebrated on TV. However, there are so many films and TV shows that have shown us snippets of this special day for Americans that it now feels a bit like ours too.
Almost every culture in the world has a special day to give thanks for an abundant harvest. Even Halloween was originally a rite to celebrate the beginning of the autumn season and to give thanks for the harvest.
To trace the origins of Thanksgiving Day, one must go back to the times of the Pilgrim Fathers. In 1620, an English ship, the Mayflower, crossed the Atlantic with about a hundred religious refugees on board, intending to settle in the New World. This was a group of separatists who had begun to question some points of the Anglican Church's creed and wanted to break away from it. These people, whom history remembers as the Pilgrim Fathers, settled near what is now the state of Massachusetts, where they arrived on December 16, 1620. The first winter was quite harsh for them: they had arrived too late to cultivate many crops, and without fresh food, half of the colony died of starvation or disease.
Legend has it that the following spring, the local natives, perhaps Iroquois Indians, taught them how to hunt, fish, and grow corn—a food they had never encountered before—and many other crops suitable for that unfamiliar land. In the autumn of 1621, the pilgrims had generous harvests of corn, barley, beans, and pumpkins. Moreover, they had learned from the Indians how to cook blueberries and various types of vegetables. At this point, the colonists had much to be thankful for, so they organized a feast and invited the natives to join them, who brought deer to roast and turkeys. In the following years, these first colonists continued to celebrate the autumn harvest with a thanksgiving feast.
However, the true story is a bit different: the native Indians had already been decimated by the English in an expedition that took place in 1614, and only a certain Squanto, an Indian from the Pawtuxet tribe, had survived. It was Squanto who was responsible for a 20-acre corn crop that allowed the colonists to feed themselves. He himself, having learned the colonists' language through enslavement, taught them how to grow corn, hunt, and fish, and helped them negotiate peace with the Wampanoag tribe, led by Chief Massasoit. To celebrate their good fortune, the head of the colonists, William Bradford, organized a three-day feast after the harvest of 1621. Squanto and the Indians were not even invited, except for Chief Massasoit, but he showed up, much to the colonists' chagrin, with about a hundred of his people. There is no record that turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkins were served, or that prayers were recited, and the colonists never referred to this feast as a thanksgiving.
