We can learn much about being thankful by exploring the story of the Pilgrims' first harvest feast with their Native American neighbors.
The Pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth Rock on December 11, 1620. Their first New England winter was devastating. By the following Autumn, 46 of the original 102 people who sailed on the Mayflower had died. They also had a difficult time providing housing for themselves. "The Pilgrims started constructing their living houses and storehouses in late December 1620, but only managed to get a couple built before and during the first winter. They were hindered not only by the weather, but by occasional fires usually caused by a spark or ember from the fire making it onto the roof (which was constructed of dried thatch.)....Without the time, good weather, and enough manpower to quickly build a house, many of the Pilgrims continued to live onboard the Mayflower throughout the winter." (The Mayflower History website)
But the Autumn harvest of 1621 was a bountiful one. So the remaining colonists decided to celebrate survival and bounty with a feast, and eventually included 91 Wampanoag natives who had helped the Pilgrims survive their first year. The previous Spring, a Wampanoag, Squanto, showed the Pilgrims how to plant corn, how to fish, and how to gather safe (non-poisonous) berries and nuts. Pilgrim chronicler Edward Winslow wrote about the Autumn feast that "many of the Indians (are) coming... amongst the rest their great king Massasoit, with some ninety men." The Pilgrims were thankful for their neighbors Squanto and the other Wampanoags, for they knew that they would not have made it through that first dangerous and heart-rending year without the help of the natives.
The feast was actually more of a traditional English harvest festival than a true “thanksgiving” observance. And It lasted for three days. What did they eat? The "History" website tells us:
"Winslow (the chronicler wrote that the Wampanoag guests arrived with an offering of five deer. Culinary historians speculate that the deer was roasted on a spit over a smoldering fire and that the colonists might have used some of the venison to whip up a hearty stew.
"The 1621 Thanksgiving celebration marked the Pilgrims’ first autumn harvest, so it is likely that the colonists feasted on the bounty they had reaped with the help of their Native American neighbors. Local vegetables that likely appeared on the table include onions, beans, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots and perhaps peas. Corn, which records show was plentiful at the first harvest, might also have been served, but not in the way most people enjoy it now. In those days, the corn would have been removed from the cob and turned into cornmeal, which was then boiled and pounded into a thick corn mush or porridge that was occasionally sweetened with molasses.
"Fruits indigenous to the region included blueberries, plums, grapes, gooseberries, raspberries and, of course cranberries, which Native Americans ate and used as a natural dye. The Pilgrims might have been familiar with cranberries by the first Thanksgiving, but they wouldn’t have made sauces and relishes with the tart orbs. That’s because the sacks of sugar that traveled across the Atlantic on the Mayflower were nearly or fully depleted by November 1621. Cooks didn’t begin boiling cranberries with sugar and using the mixture as an accompaniment for meats until about 50 years later.
"Culinary historians believe that much of the Thanksgiving meal consisted of seafood, which is often absent from today’s menus. Mussels in particular were abundant in New England and could be easily harvested because they clung to rocks along the shoreline. The colonists occasionally served mussels with curds, a dairy product with a similar consistency to cottage cheese. Lobster, bass, clams and oysters might also have been part of the feast....
"Both the Pilgrims and members of the Wampanoag tribe ate pumpkins and other squashes indigenous to New England—possibly even during the harvest festival—but the fledgling colony lacked the butter and wheat flour necessary for making pie crust. Moreover, settlers hadn’t yet constructed an oven for baking. According to some accounts, early English settlers in North America improvised by hollowing out pumpkins, filling the shells with milk, honey and spices to make a custard, then roasting the gourds whole in hot ashes."
The three day harvest feast in 1621 was the last thanksgiving festival which the Pilgrims celebrated. And so those three days of celebrating were unique, and a lesson to us.
The Pilgrims celebrated after a dark time of death, famine, and desolation had changed only recently into a time of plenty, and they did not know when bad weather might return them to a time of near-famine. The participants must have had many painful memories, and missed their loved ones who had died, yet they chose to celebrate the present goodness in their lives. They celebrated without many of the foods which they were accustomed to, such as sugar, or wheat, and also without dairy products, for they had no domestic cattle. They made do with the foods which they had. They celebrated after a time of difficult transition, during which they had not had adequate housing. They celebrated even though many of them had dear relatives back home in England who were waiting to find passage on ships to join them.
The Pilgrims' choice to have a feast of thanksgiving reminds us that none of us ever has a "perfect time" in their life during which we can be perfectly happy and at peace. And yet, we can choose to be perfectly thankful for what we have had and what we now have. Any occasions of thanksgiving are precarious, balanced between joys and tragedies and difficulties. Yet they are luminous moments because we know that when we look at our entire lives, we are grateful for the gift of life itself, the gift of relationships, the gift of places to stay, a roof over our heads even if we may not own it, the gift of food, even if it is not what we're used to having. We are thankful because we have enough for us at this moment.
This was also the last great feast which the Native Americans celebrated with the Pilgrims. For a time, relations between the natives and the white men remained cordial. They even made a treaty. It is heart-warming to realize that Pilgrim chronicler Edward Winslow maintained his friendship with the Wampanoag King Massasoit. The Mayflower history website tells us,
"In March 1623, Massasoit became extremely ill, and when word came to Plymouth, Edward Winslow made a trip to ...visit him.... They found Massasoit in his house, full of many visitors. Massasoit was now blind, but could still understand--when they told him the English had come to visit him, he asked "Keen Winslow?" which means "Are you Winslow?" Then he said, "Matta neen wonckanet namen, Winslow!", which means 'O Winslow, I shall never see you again.' Winslow gave him a little bit of medicine, and scraped out the inside of his mouth which had swollen up preventing him from eating or drinking anything. Then he gave Massasoit some water and more medicine. In about half an hour, Massasoit had regained his eye sight and was getting better. Winslow made a chicken broth soup for Massasoit, and within a couple days Massasoit had his appetite back, and eventually recovered. Massasoit then revealed to the Pilgrims a conspiracy plot by the Massachusetts Indians to attack them and the Wessagusett Colony, and the Pilgrims led by Myles Standish, with the help of some of Massasoit's men, defeated the plot before it could materialize."
Yet we know that, despite many who built friendships across these different cultures, across the centuries the white man and the Native American became enemies, to the point that the Native tribes were almost exterminated by the newcomers. Today, Thanksgiving Day is a national day of mourning for Native Americans. In fact, one Native speaker has said that the greatest mistake that King Massasoit ever made in his life was to welcome and to aid the Pilgrims. Perhaps, on Thanksgiving, we who are not Native can take time to remember our gratefulness to Massasoit and his people for the Pilgrims' survival, and also to privately search our consciences for ways to say "thank you" and reach out to the Native tribes living among us so that we can become true neighbors once more. And rediscover peace and understanding.
A reader, Carmella LaSpada, wrote to "Dear Abby" a day or so ago with a request:
"Dear Abby: Our organization, No Greater Love, honors America’s fallen and their families, and promotes peace. I am reaching out to invite you and your readers to become links in our Chain of Prayer for Peace. As you gather at Thanksgiving, add a special prayer for peace. Our goal is to link the five major world religions — Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism — all of which regard peace as a universal concept. While our specific beliefs may differ, we are all one through our quest for love and peace."
I pass this wonderful, inspired request along to you, dear readers, and ask you to pass it along, so that at many, many Thanksgiving tables this year across the country, among people of all faiths, races, ethnicities, and political beliefs, prayers will be said for Peace on Earth. If we can see each other as brothers and sisters, united by our common humanity and our common spiritual DNA as children of God, our deepest thanksgiving will be for each other, for the existence of all of us in this world. In 1621, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag came together in peace for one luminous, three day festival, giving thanks not only for an abundant harvest, but also for each other. So we too, though also different in so many ways, can, through our mutual prayer, encompass our whole world with thanksgiving and peace - this luminous Thursday.