(Thanks)Giving

by Liv Stecker

It’s November. Status updates across the country are shouting all of the reasons we are thankful. Travel plans are flying faster between cross-country family members than the actual planes that will carry them to each other. Cooks are Googling new recipes and digging old family ones out of boxes and cupboards. Smokers and roasters and deep fryers are being uprooted from the top shelf in the garage and dusted off. 

We recite the well-worn tales of Pilgrims and the friendly Native Americans who helped them survive that first terrible winter, saving the struggling remnant from starvation, teaching them the abundance of their new American soil. The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in the fashion of the old English harvest celebration tradition, and coincided with one of the Native American’s many thanksgiving feasts throughout the year. For the people who lived here before the European settlers landed, thanksgiving was a way of life rather than one day out of 365.

Gratitude is something that fades in and out of popularity like a well-crafted meme on social media. In the United States, we are reminded to be grateful for our comfortable lifestyle, our first-world problems of too hot lattes and costly designer bottled water. We are rich, even the poorest among us, we have much to be grateful for. The health of family members, the roof over our heads, the surety of the next meal – America has been, from its inception, the land of plenty.

The Story of the first Thanksgiving tells another story of our heritage as a nation. The Wampanoag tribe that welcomed the ragtag bunch of seasick English men and women from the Mayflower in 1620 did so at a high cost. Thanksgiving was the celebration of the first harvest of corn, which the Pilgrims reaped only because of the help of a few willing Native Americans who believed in their human responsibility for the care and well-being of their new neighbors. Generations later, the tribe that came to that first feast to celebrate would be reduced to a fraction of their strength and size by the disease and war that the European settlers brought with them. But in 1621, the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims held a protection treaty that promised mutual aid against outside enemies. They celebrated that fall with no knowledge of the future, but in good faith and great hope.

That first party consisted of 50 Pilgrims and 90 Native Americans – almost twice as many Indians as white Europeans. The four surviving English women prepared most of the meal while the men competed in sports and went hunting. Contrary to legend, there was no turkey on the menu, but five deer the Wampanoag provided, goose, duck and real unsweetened and unsauced cranberries. Pumpkins and other squash were roasted whole with milk and honey, as the white flour for piecrusts was fresh out at the local grocer. Acorns and ground nuts rounded out the quintessential paleo feast, and since the meal lacked the refined carbs and sugar, the attendees probably skipped the post-gorge nap and got in on an afternoon game of pigskin or lacrosse. According to Pilgrim historian Edward Winslow: “amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us.”

Thanksgiving as we know it became a tradition hundreds of years later though legislation and presidential proclamations, beginning with George Washington in 1789 and finalizing with Honest Abe Lincoln. The original three-day festival of games and hunting has evolved into a weekend of parades and shopping sprees, Turkey Trot 5Ks, black Friday and football games.  And underneath it all sometimes we can find buried the original theme of neighborly kindness. Across America families reach out to each other, and the ones with no families, making room at their tables and sharing the bounty that we all enjoy year round. We set aside our privacy for a moment, our thoughts of self-preservation and our hoarding tendencies to open our doors to new neighbors and old friends. This is the real story of Thanksgiving. It isn’t the meat and the pie and the door buster deals at 4 AM. It’s the people all around us who will give out of their abundance, without consider