The First Thanksgiving

Another fall season has dwindled down and winter is right around the corner. Thanksgiving is at hand and that means it is time for the white-tailed deer-hunting season. And for we indoor-types there should be some good football games on TV. Also a huge, colorful Thanksgiving parade to watch, as we witness the official opening of the Christmas shopping season.

Many of our schoolrooms are decorated with pictures and drawings of turkeys, pilgrims, and corn shocks, with an occasional cornucopia spilling out its abundance of fruits and vegetables. And school children are again hearing the age-old story of the Pilgrims and the Indians.

We’re told that harvest festivals have been held in many parts of the world since ancient times. And that it was only natural for the Pilgrims to want to celebrate in the fall of 1621, when their first year’s crop in the New World had been successfully grown and harvested. Also, for them to invite their new neighbors, the Native Americans, who had been so helpful in teaching them to fish and to grow a number new crops – plants that they had never seen before coming there, or even knew existed.

Some historians say that the “giving thanks” part didn’t come about until several years later when, after a period of prayer and fasting, rains came to end a long dry spell. The idea of giving thanks for bountiful crops and a successful harvest caught on and became very near and dear to most Americans. In 1863, during the War Between the States, President Abraham Lincoln felt it would help to bolster the morale of the people of the Union if he were to proclaim Thanksgiving a legal holiday.

There are still a few of us around who remember a time when President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that the great fall holiday should be celebrated one week earlier. Some felt that he was only catering to retail merchants who wanted a longer Christmas shopping season. Many people disliked the idea. They refused to celebrate “Franksgiving” (as the President’s political enemies loved to call it), and continued to enjoy their feast of turkey, breadcrumb stuffing, sweet and mashed potatoes, cranberries, pumpkin pie, and assorted other goodies on the traditional day. Two years later FDR admitted that he had made a mistake and signed a bill establishing the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving Day.

It is difficult to imagine the suffering of the Pilgrims during their first winter in the New World. They are said to have landed on Plymouth’s “stern and rock-bound coast” on December 21st, 1620, poorly prepared and not well equipped to survive a winter there. A good number of them did not live to see the next spring.

THE FIRST THANKSGIVING

Pilgrims on strange,
Forbidding land,
Put down their roots,
Made a strong stand,

Knowing hard work
Would be a must
If, to this world,
They could adjust.

Native neighbors
Helped them survive,
Taught new skills that
Kept them alive.

New, strange crops grown
From Indians’ seeds
Thrived well enough
To fill their needs.

Maize, squash, and beans
Gave bumper yields
In Pilgrims’ new,
Small hand-tilled fields.

They surveyed such
Progress with pride.
A special day
They set aside,

Asked Indians
To join their ranks
For feasting and
For giving thanks.

Good food, they did
No longer lack,
Yet some thoughtful
Ones still looked back,

Recalling, on
This festive day,
Their Old World homes
So far away,

Their suffering on
That ocean trip,
With hearts and souls
Locked in fear’s grip.

But now, looking
Forward, they knew
Courage and hard
Work brought them through,

That on this first
Thanksgiving Day,
They, by God’s grace,
Were here to stay.

Emil Schmit is the 93 year old father of Pam Buttikofer, one of the owners of Imperfect Women. Emil continues to write although age and health issues have slowed him down a bit. He is a is a self-trained poet, free-lance writer, public speaker, and journalist. His weekly column, “Rhyme and Reason,” appeared for over twenty years in the Dubuque, Iowa daily newspaper, the Telegraph Herald. You can read more of Emil’s Bio here. The typewriter pictured on the bio page is one that he sat at for over 50 years creating many of his “rhymes and reasons.”