Thanksgiving, the great American Myth.

There’s something incredibly wholesome about getting together with family and offering thanks for all the good things in life, even if the only thing you can come up with while you’re around the table is that you don’t have to have dinner with these people more than once or twice a year.

That having been said, I think everyone should know that Thanksgiving is a fake holiday. It’s not the most artificial holiday on the calendar, it’s more real than Valentine’s Day but less real than Veterans’ Day (which might be the most unfake holiday, tying for that honor with Martin Luther King Jr. Day).

I realize that most of you are probably angry with me at this point. I assure you that I have many reasons for feeling like I do, allow me to share them with you.

First off, Thanksgiving is supposed to be a commeration of the first colony to be founded in the new world. Putting the story simply, it was on this glorious day that the Pilgrims came together with their new native friends and celebrated the endurance of their new home.

This is a great story, but it’s important to realize it’s just that, a story, a myth, a pleasent fiction on which to base a cultural event.

If you were to read nearly any elementary history textbook, it is quite clear that the first lasting English colony on American soil was that of Jamestown (1607) in what would one day become the state of Virginia.

Prior to that the French and Spanish had already set up outposts in the new world, but these were mostly military and so mostly ignored. Jamestown on the other hand gets ignored because it was an economic venture.

The first Thanksgiving feast was held in 1621. It was a one time festival celebrating a successful harvest and lasted for three days. It wasn’t about family or religion for the Pilgrims, it was about being thankful to be alive. If it had been a celebration of family or religion then Native Americans wouldn’t have been on the guest list.

They probably didn’t eat turkey either. While corn and squash were probably on the menu there weren’t any cranberries. The only thing we know for certain was on the table was deer.

Of course, even though the pilgrims invited their native neighbors, they didn’t feed them. Oh they wanted to, that’s for sure, but they were ill-prepared for the number of guests that arrived. A Wampanoag chief named Massasoit was a gracious enough guest to send some men home for supplies. Boy, those Pilgrims must have been red in the face over that one.
Since the “first” thanksgiving was a one time affair, how is it that we still celebrate it today? You might say that it’s because of a president’s thankfulness that civil war hadn’t destroyed the nation.

It wasn’t until 1863 that President Abraham Lincoln appointed a day of thanksgiving as the last Thursday in November. Since his historic gesture, every president after him has issued a Thanksgiving Day proclamation. It wasn’t until 1939 that President Franklin D. Roosevelt set the official day as the Fourth Thursday in November–though it took Congress until 1941 to ratify it.

It seems like everything we “know” about the Pilgrims is wrong. They didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, they made landfall at Provincetown. The rock story is just a fable repeated over and over since it was first uttered by Thomas Faunce 100 years after the Pilgrim landing. Faunce was 95 years old at the time.

Not even our images of the pilgrims are right, the funny hats and and shoes with buckles are merely illustrator’s images designed to give quaint feeling to the colonists. Buckles didn’t come into fasion until late in the 17th century, long after the colonies were up and running. Pilgrims might have worn black, but probably only to church.

Not only are the Pilgrims painted wrongly, but the Native Americans are as well. In popular illustrations indians are shown wearing feather head dresses, which would be fine if it were the set of a John Wayne movie, but feathers were a tradition from plains indian tribes whom the Plymouth colonists could never have meet.

So, just to recap: No Turkey, No Rock, No Buckles, No Feathers, No first colony, No tradition lasting from 1621 until the present.

In the end, what is left? Only friends, family, a warm meal to share every year and lots of leftovers to snack on.

Speaking of leftovers, I’m starting to get hungry, time to reheat the mashed potatoes and stuffing.