Telling Your Story
When I think of Thanksgiving's history, I go to the history and stories we learned in elementary school—Puritans and Indigenous neighbors feasting and gaming for several days in the Plymouth Colony. The surviving Europeans had a lot to be grateful for in their quest for freedom. Many of them didn't survive, and the ones that did clawed their way inch by inch to survival and a new beginning.
But community days of thanksgiving celebrations with entertainment, food and religious gatherings were a tradition among both Europeans and native Americans before the Pilgrims made Thanksgiving famous in North America.
It's possible that the first European Thanksgiving service on the continent was held by Spanish colonists in Florida on Sept. 8, 1565. The explorers founded the city of St. Augustine in Spanish La Florida and celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving followed by a meal after they landed. Guests were members of the local Seloy tribe.
Another recorded Thanksgiving celebration happened 10 years later on May 27, 1578, when Martin Frobisher and his English crew landed safely in Newfoundland, Canada, looking for the Northwest Passage.
The Popham Colony in Maine may have conducted a Thanksgiving service in 1607, but the colony was abandoned a year later and thus overlooked by history. Jamestown, Va. gave thanks for their safe arrival in 1607 and held another service three years later after a supply ship arrived after the harsh winter.
Another Virginia colony known as the Berkeley Hundred held a Thanksgiving service in accordance with their colonial charter, which said that the day of their arrival in 1619 "shall be perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God." Unfortunately, distrust between the Europeans and Indigenous people led to violence and all the Berkeley Hundred settlers were massacred in 1622.
The tradition of a day of thanks was observed mostly in the northeast for the next two and a half centuries. But Sarah Joseph Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book and famous for penning Mary Had a Little Lamb, long believed that Thanksgiving should be observed everywhere, every year. She wrote a letter to President Abraham Lincoln in September of 1863, asking for him to make Thanksgiving a holiday observed by the entire nation. He proclaimed the fourth Thursday in November be designated for a day of thanks, and, not surprisingly, Confederate states weren't willing to go along with the notion of a day set aside for thanks proclaimed by a president with whom they were at war.
Congress made Thanksgiving official in 1870, and we have set aside a day of thanks each year since.
It's a remarkable journey from the first Thanksgiving to today, 460 years if we go back to the first recorded event. Explorers and settlers were searching for a dream. Some chasing wealth, adventure or a place in history. Others were looking for a place to be free from political or religious tyranny, a new start, or the chance to own land or build a business.
Their journeys were brutal, and upon arrival, survival a gamble. Yet they gave thanks to God for mercy, life and provision.
Provision wasn't manna that landed on the ground every day. It came through hard labor—hand-hewn logs for homes, churches and business, food grown, hunted and gathered; chopped and gathered wood for cooking and heating fires, and gathering herbs, berries and other flora for medical use.
Can you imagine that life, and would you have taken that risk to leave on a dream for a better stake? A lot of those dreamers never got that better stake for themselves, but inch by inch, they were part of building a dream that exists today.
Thanksgiving. It's not just about the things, the stuff, the cozy and the nice. It's gratefulness for the good times and hard times that shape us. It's thankfulness for the people who are with us now and those that paved a way.
As we gather around the table with family and friends, remember to reflect on the who and what which came before in order that we could live life abundantly today.
Bev Berens is a freelance writer and empty nester from Vestaburg, Mich. She can be contacted at uphillfarm494@yahoo.com.