Have you ever wondered how the celebration of Thanksgiving began? To find out you must travel back to November 1621.
A congregation of men, women and children dressed in sombre black and white clothes gathered to give thanks to their God for the tables laden with meat, fish, corn bread, fruit and vegetables.
Only one year before these Puritan Pilgrims had set sail from England on the ‘Mayflower‘ in a bid to find a new world where they could worship freely and not be imprisoned for their beliefs. Their faith in God was rewarded and on the 11th November 1620, the ship made a landing in New England. The pilgrims searched for land on which to build their settlement and eventually found a place called Plymouth that had a calm harbour for the ship, a river for fresh water, and flat lands where they could plant crops. During that first winter, they struggled to build shelters as exceptionally heavy snow and sleet interfered with the work and a great illness swept throughout the colony. Of the 102 pilgrims who left England only 47 survived.
One Spring day, a native American Indian of the Abnaki tribe walked into the settlement and told of how he had made voyages to Europe and had learned to speak a little of the English language. His name was Squanto and he showed the pilgrims how to plant Indian corn by heaping the earth into low mounds with several seeds and adding fish to each mound explaining that the decaying fish would fertilize the corn giving them a good crop.
He taught them how to tap the maple trees for sap and told them which plants were poisonous and which had medicinal powers as well as teaching them how to hunt and fish. Because of Squanto’s help, the harvest had been very successful and the Indians had become friends trading furs with the settlement.
When the harvest was gathered in, they gathered together to give thanks to God for bringing them to this wonderful land where they had managed to built homes in the wilderness; raise enough crops to keep them alive during the long coming winter; were at peace with their Indian neighbours and most importantly of all could worship their God freely.
Little did that small colony of pilgrims know they would become famous known in history as the Pilgrim Fathers or that the tradition of a Thanksgiving Feast would continue to be celebrated by Americans every November for many hundreds of years and is still relevant in today’s world.