By Steven Foster –
Time once again to celebrate the American thanksgiving tradition myth when we harken back to the happy days of the first celebration feast when the Wampanoag Indians brought roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and green bean casserole to the Pilgrims gathered near Plymouth, Massachusetts in November 1621 to celebrate the autumn harvest.
How we like to invent history. Just last night, while watching the Monday night football game played in Mexico City, I was astounded to hear one the commentators actually say that Mexico City was founded in 1521 by Spanish explorers. The city, Tenochitilan was created by the Aztecs in 1325, though the site had been settled for thousands of years. In another 500 years, we may hear that Mexico City was established in 2016 by the National Football League. But I digress.
Autumnal harvest festivals are as old as humans and agriculture. Certainly if the crops came in, a feast of gratitude was due to any god or gods worshiped for a successful harvest. Otherwise one would not survive the winter. The Pilgrims who landed at what is now Plymouth on Cape Cod in 1620, certainly had reason to celebrate in the fall of 1621. They had survived a brutal year. Nearly half of the 102 souls who arrived on the over-crowded and disease-ridden Mayflower in 1620 died the first winter. That first winter, they only survived by pilfering the corn stores of a local tribe.
Prayers were answered when a fortunate alliance was struck with the Wampanoag Indians, who brought five deer to that first harvest festival that is the American creation myth of Thanksgiving. The pilgrims hunted wild fowl, perhaps wild turkey. Corn, then a cultivated grain with short seed stalks a few inches long, would have been pounded into meal to make a porridge or a flat bread. Likely, acorns or wild rice, abundant wild foods in northern New England, added to the fare, and perhaps seafood as well. However, even at the time of the Revolutionary War, captured British soldiers lodged formal complaints of mistreatment when fed lobsters – then regarded as pig food (just like corn is today in most of Western Europe).
I am grateful that the Plymouth Colony eventually thrived. My own 14th great-grandfather, Reginald Foster, arrived from England to Ipswich, Essex County, Massachusetts in 1639 in a squadron of eight ships that sailed from London, despite Charles the First’s proclamation which refused his dissenting subjects, the Puritans, the security of the wilderness. And so it is with gratitude that I celebrate the American harvest festival that we call “Thanksgiving,” as I contemplate my own creation myth.