Many of those were part of a religious group intent on separating from the Church of England, their beliefs outlawed in their home country.
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IJ.com reached out to several people with Native American heritage for their opinions on the matter. So while turkey may have been on the table, it’s also possible they returned with other types of bird – possibly ducks, geese or swans. Let’s start with the 17th Century pilgrims. Their fare consisted of wild game, not a store-bought turkey.
Half the colonists died that first year, and the rest would have followed had it not been for the aid of the Wampanoag Indians. But it also helps us to respect the present-day struggle of the Syrian refugees and the ongoing struggle our Native American brothers and sisters face everyday – particularly on Thanksgiving Day. But the celebration of the Pilgrims’ first harvest in 1621 gets all the attention because of Bradford’s proclamation, which might in this context be regarded as an early and successful exercise in spin control.
This is the story of the first Thanksgiving – except it isn’t. Then came the 1621 harvest feast in Plymouth, Massachusetts; this is the big dinner remembered every November.
Likewise, sweet potatoes, a staple of today’s Thanksgiving menu, are native to this hemisphere, specifically South America, but they had not yet made their way north by the time of the first Thanksgiving. Spanish colonists, for example, had a similar meal in Texas 100 years earlier. The documentary was not shown to take away from the current day of “thanksgiving and praise” but to enlighten on the holiday’s true origin.
As we sit down to our Thanksgiving meal this year, it’s important that much like the Pilgrims and Native Americans, we must set aside the stress and hardships we may be facing.
Another aspect of Thanksgiving that has become a crucial tradition is charity.
Dressing children up as pilgrims, Indians and turkeys is far removed from honoring a Thanksgiving ceremony. At the point, the only other national holidays were Washington’s birthday and Independence Day.
Let us express our gratitude by welcoming others to our celebrations and recognize those who volunteer today to ensure a dinner is possible for those who might have gone without. Turks usually think the idea of eating pumpkin pie sounds very odd. Young mistakenly determined that the days of thanksgiving celebrated in the United States and national and state levels traced back to the pilgrims.
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It was that day that 38 settlers, funded by the Virginia Company of London and led by Captain John Woodlief, arrived at Berkeley and proclaimed: “We ordaine that the day of our ship’s arrival at the place assigned for plantation, in the land of Virginia, shall be yearly and perpetually keept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God”. In the midst of bitter division at a critical juncture for America, President Abraham Lincoln acknowledged the plight of the most vulnerable, declaring a “day of thanksgiving”, on which all citizens would “commend to [God’s] tender care” those most affected by the violence of the time – widows, orphans, mourners, and sufferers of the Civil War.
