Five Interesting Facts about the first Thanksgiving
Five Interesting Facts about the First Thanksgiving
Three hundred ninety years ago the Plymouth Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians did not regard the first Thanksgiving as the day before Black Friday. In fact whatever they wanted, whether it was food or clothing, was hunted, grown, or made before it could be utilized. There were fifty surviving Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower escaping from religious persecution in England. They were known asPuritansand their religious beliefs were different from the Church of England.
The first Thanksgiving took place in 1621 somewhere in the Plymouth colony, although the exact location is unknown. The festival was the culmination of a land deal between Chief Massasoit and the Pilgrims’ right to occupy 12,000 acres of Wampanoag land near Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The pilgrims invited only the chief, but he decided to bring nearly one hundred of his tribe.Squanto, a member of the Pawtuxet tribe and former slave helped broker the deal between theWampanoag tribeand the English settlers. He also taught the settlers to work the land and survive the brutal New England winters. The treaty Squanto facilitated between the two groups would last for fifty years and remained one of the few examples of Native Americans and Colonists living in harmony.
Most of us think of certain kinds of food when thinking of Thanksgiving feasts. The first settlers and Wampanoag tribe didn’t have supermarkets to shop for turkeys, potatoes, gravy, and stuffing. Sowhat did they eat? Historians and educators made deductions, but no one knows for sure. Of course, their first festival possibly had some similar foods to today’s Thanksgiving tables today. In coastal areas, shellfish and other kinds of fish could be caught. Further inland, rabbits, ducks, and geese were hunted. And since refrigeration didn’t exist,meathad to be salted, smoked, or dried. If the settlers kept goats, they used them for cheese or milk. Most likely they kept chickens for eggs and found hickory and other nuts.
Although the first Thanksgiving feast had some vegetables, they did not make up the majority of the meal. They ate beans, onions, radishes, carrots, leeks, and several kinds of squashes. Did the settlers and Indians have pumpkin pie for dessert? No, since they didn’t have ovens. If they considered any foods considered desserts, they possibly ate nuts, or something sweetened with honey gathered from bee hives or combs. Another sweetener tapped from trees in the winter was maple syrup. These foods may not be included on the holiday tables of modern families, but certainly some of them have made their way through history.
In the 21st century, Thanksgiving is a four-day holiday weekend. Students don’t have classes and many families get away for the weekend to visit other family members. In the 17th century, the first Thanksgiving lasted three days. Perhaps, the feast happened on the third day. The first two days were for catching and preparing food.
What did those first settlers wear? School children learn that pilgrims dressed in black and white clothes. It’s possible they did at some point, such as on Sundays. Yet the settlers constructed clothing and colored them from what they knew. Most common types of cloth used were wool, linen, and leather. They dyed clothes from vegetables, giving them a wide variety ofcolors, if not patterns. Clothes were bright, but had neither the colorfastness nor designs today’s clothes have, since sun and rain faded colors. Men, women, children, babies, and toddlers hadspecific types of clothesthey wore. So, were the clothes of the Pilgrims drab? Not in the least. Colors such as burgundy, red, green, brown, beige, in addition to black and white made their clothes interesting. It might have been guesswork to know what colors they wore, but upon their deaths,clothing inventorieswere taken. They revealed some interesting facts.
Today’s tables are set with not only an assortment of china or porcelain dishes. An assortment of forks, spoons, knives and other serving utensils are used. Although it is possible that the English settlers brought some utensils with them, they conserved space and weight on the Mayflower. No one was considered rude when eating with fingers. Some accounts told of the settlers eating with spoons and knives, but no forks.
A search on the Internet will show otherinteresting factsabout the first and succeeding Thanksgiving celebrations.
Many of the facts regarding Thanksgiving traditions developed in later years. Much of what we know as holiday customs have been passed on over time. Some families have their own traditions developed within their own “tribes,” whether they are Native Americans or descendants of the Pilgrims.
