Each year, in October and November, stationery counters offer napkins and paper plates depicting plump children and smiling parents in quaint hats and buckled shoes, preparing a lavish meal.
In schoolrooms throughout the nation, teachers instruct pupils in the art of making cornucopias filled with yellow and red and orange construction paper fruits and vegetables. There are pageants, too, and plays, for which mothers sew charming costumes to be worn by plump, freshly groomed girls and boys.
It is the time when candle stores offer wax figures in wide-collared suits and pointed hats—out of which a bit of wick protrudes—to shed a romantic glow upon the dinner table or sideboard.
All this and more accompanies our twentieth-century celebration of a festival first observed in this nation in 1621 when a small group of settlers in Massachusetts called for “a day of rejoicing” after their first planting had produced an adequate harvest.
But however nostalgia–provoking this decor may be, it is a far cry from the original event. The paper napkins and candle figures are part of a myth which substitutes imagination for reality, that emasculates the originators, and that emphasizes eating instead of worshipping. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, the Pilgrim has become a motif around which to plan a holiday.
For the true story of the first Thanksgiving Day, it is necessary to return to the records written by people who were there. On such account is included in A Relation or Journal of the Beginnings and Proceedings of t he English Plantation Settled at Plymouth in New England (Printed in London in 1622). It is a letter from Plymouth Colony, dated December 11, 1621, offering advice and directions to others who might be interested in coming to that settlement.
The writer, generally assumed to be Edward Winslow, reports that during the colonists’ first spring, with advice from the Indians, they planted 20 acres of Indian corn and 6 of barley and peas. The corn crop was good, the barley fair, but the peas had not been worth gathering.
When this crop had been harvested, the leader , William Bradford, sent men to shoot fowl so that, as the letter puts it, “we might after a more special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors.” This celebration lasted almost a week, during which the colonists feasted, practiced marksmanship, and entertained their friend Massasoit and 90 of his men, who contributed 5 deer to the occasion.
The other record of the event occurs in Bradford’s history, Of Plymouth Plantation, which he began to write in 1630, 9 years after it took place. His account develops the theme: “the Lord is never wanting unto His in their greatest needs; let His Holy name have all the praise.”
They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against the winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc.
In Bradford’s history, this short passage follows his narrative of the Pilgrims’ sufferings in England, their sojourn in Holland, their extensive preparations for removal to the New World, the Mayflower voyage, and the hardships of the winter of 1620–1621.
He recalls how after the ship’s arrival at Cape Cod on November 11, it was necessary for searching parties to explore the mainland to find the most advantageous location for their settlement. On these trying, sometimes hazardous expeditions, the men endured bitter winter storms; the sea spray often froze to a glaze on their coats. At night they tried to shelter themselves in crude barricades, made of thick pine boughs. Indians skulked about them; there were terrifying sounds in the night, whether of men or animals they could not be sure.
More than a month of such exertions was necessary before a place of settlement could be agreed upon. By that time, exhaustion, frequent wettings, cold, and inadequate diet had taken their toll. The result was that many, who had caught heavy colds, developed bronchial infections and racking coughs; scurvy and other diseases began to claim victims.
During the January and February that followed, in the depth of winter, sickness raged. Bradford writes that in the time of greatest distress only 6 or 7 persons remained well enough to care for the sick. These few:
spared no pains night or day, but with abundance of toil and hazard of their own health, fetched wood, made the fires, dressed them meat (meaning, prepared their food), made their beds, washed their loathsome clothes, clothed and unclothed them.
And although Bradford makes no mention of it, surely they also had to bury those who died, sometimes 2 or 3 in a day.
Death made no distinctions: it took husbands with their wives, children with their parents, masters and apprentices, mistresses and their servants. Of the 101 who made up the original number, one-half died. Mary Chilton, Samuel Fuller, Priscilla Mullens, and Elizabeth Tilley each lost both parents. Isaac Allerton’s 3 children were motherless, as was Francis Eaton’s baby boy. Of the original 18 married couples in the group, only 3 pairs survived. In 9 cases, husband and wife had both died; 5 men were widowers; Susanna White, whose second son had been born on the Mayflower, was a widow.
Not until warmer weather returned to the Atlantic coast was there relief. Bradford writes that when spring came,
it pleased God, the mortality began to cease amongst them, and the sick and the lame recovered apace, which put as it were new life into them, though they had borne their sad affliction with much patience and contentedness as I think any people could do. But it was the Lord which upheld them, and had beforehand prepared them; many having long borne the yoke, yea, even from their youth.
It was the remnant, then, who had prepared the alien, rocky soil, planted English barley and Indian corn, and picked up the pieces of their lives. There can have been little leisure time, except perhaps for those Sunday hours not spent in worship. Dwelling places had to be improved; relations with the Indians needed to be established on an honest basis. There was a heavy debt to be paid, now the responsibility of one-half the number of original borrowers. Fishing, fur trading, and lumbering had to be carried on to provide means of satisfying London creditors. For protection from possible Indian attacks, the colonists used precious time and energies to build a palisade around the settlement and its gardens.
It was this small band whom Bradford wisely called away from their toil for “a day of rejoicing.”
No artist was present to reproduce the occasion -to sketch the rude tables and the simple foods, to capture the shrunken, faded clothing and shapeless shoes, the burned skin and the bleached hair.
There was no journalist to interview the surviving leaders, Bradford and Winslow, whose wives were both dead, or widowed Susanna White, or orphaned Priscilla Mullens. No one has recorded, with words or brush, the effects on the children of being hungry and cold and feverish, of crying in the black night for a parent who did not come.
The scant surviving record does not deal with these matters. It does relate what its writers thought was most important for following generations to understand -that it was an unshakable faith in God’s providential dealings with them that sustained the Pilgrims.
These are the real people who observed a day of thanksgiving. They are very different from Hallmark’s mannikins.
Gerda Bos is professor of English at Trinity Christian College, Palos Heights, Chicago.
The Editor of this department is Mrs. L. Vanden Heuvel whose address is 207 Kansas Ave., N. W. , Orange City, Iowa 510141.