What if Thanksgiving was never meant to be what we’ve made it into?
Are you the person who dreads the Thanksgiving meal because of the conflict or drama or judgement that happens every time your family is together? Are you the student who’s been gone at college discovering more of who you are and feels lost when you go home because you have changed so much, but they have not? Are you the adult who has to go to work on Thanksgiving and won’t get the peaceful holiday everyone else has? Do you flinch at the thought of turkey because with turkey comes toxic family members? Do you approach the holidays with apprehension because they only bring the grief of missing those you’ve lost?
Or maybe it’s just been a really hard year and all the Thanksgiving tropes seem rather empty compared to the gut wrenching stuff you’ve faced in the past year. Do you gag when grandma suggests you go around the table and each say what you’re thankful for? Do roll your eyes when your friend posts a gratitude post each day leading up to Thanksgiving? Maybe it all just seems so trite in light of the reality you’ve lived over the past 12 months. You couldn’t care less about pilgrims and pumpkins right now.
The reality is that the Pilgrims and Native Americans who attended that first Thanksgiving feast would likely not recognize the romanticized holiday we now celebrate. So if you’re just not having it this Thanksgiving, know that those first feast attendants are right there with you.
If anyone had the right to be ungrateful, it was the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. I’m serious. They didn’t even have a national holiday about being thankful yet. They could have easily let November pass them by and sat in the suffering instead. Actually, that is probably the more realistic Thanksgiving story, to be honest.
Because that first year of the pilgrim settlement was not a good one. To fully understand the big picture, though, we have to back up a few years.
Meet: the pilgrims. That’s how we know them anyways. But at the time, they were just everyday English people. They were not extraordinary in any way. Many of them probably never even wanted to be the rebels they became. These were humble God-fearing people, and this is exactly why they first started feeling discontent where they were. They faced a growing frustration with all the bells and whistles of the Church of England. They felt increasingly convicted to return to the two main things of Christianity: God and the Bible. This began their journey as what we now know as Puritans. In their efforts to practice this simple way of worshipping, they realized they would soon need to separate from the Church of England altogether. This brought them great persecution and they decided to leave England so they could be free to worship as they saw fit. This leaving soon turned to fleeing when several failed attempts caused many of their members to be caught and taken to prison. Eventually many of the men made it to Amsterdam, though the passage of the women and children was interrupted and many were caught and imprisoned. Eventually, but slowly, the women and children made their way over to Amsterdam and their families were reunited. They were grateful to finally have the freedom they’d sought, but soon found that they felt like strangers in a foreign land. Amsterdam would never be home, and their worship would always be influenced by this. So they made the decision to settle in America and start over with a blank slate and a hopeful future.
Speaking of future, I would be remiss to not say that there was a young Native American boy many years earlier whose future had been stolen by an evil English trader. This boy was named Tisquantum, later known as Squanto. His people had a long history of making trades with the Englishmen. Both parties needed something from the other, and it seemed to be a valuable arrangement…until it didn’t. A man named Thomas Hunt was one of these English traders who got greedy. I imagine the evil gleam of lust for money sparkle in his eye as he looked at these people without any regard for their humanity. Instead, he kidnapped 24 Native American people to bring back to England and sell as slaves. Squanto’s future was ripped from his grasp. His life was in the hands of a few white men who just wanted to use him for money. I cannot imagine how humiliating and soul-crushing that reality must have been. Squanto ended up in several different situations throughout the next decade or so, and he eventually ended up with some Spanish monks who led him to the Lord. Some histories speak of this event as if the white men needed to domesticate Squanto to be civilized and covert him to proper theology instead of the animalistic spirituality of his ancestors. This is an incredibly wrong and unjust way of viewing history through our European eyes. I hope that one day we will stop associating spiritual conversion with western values and forced assimilation. And while I do think this view of Squanto’s conversion is wrong, I also believe that God was with him. And even though it seems clear that God placed Squanto in very strategic places at strategic times in history, I also believe that God wept at the injustice and oppression Squanto faced, just as He weeps with you over the injustice and suffering you’ve faced this year.
Through every challenge that Squanto faced, he was always trying to get back home. He fought to go home, and he fought hard. After pushing through obstacle after obstacle, he finally boarded a ship and returned to his homeland in 1619. I wonder how many nights Squanto stayed up thinking about his friends and family and how deeply he missed them. I wonder how much hope and anticipation he felt as he stepped out of that boat and back onto the land he called home. Imagine then the depth of grief he felt when he found nothing but bones in his old village. While he was gone, some English fishermen had brought a plague to Squanto’s people and they had all died. It happened so rapidly that they didn’t even have time or strength to bury their dead, and Squanto found their bones scattered throughout the place he called home. The devastation, disappointment, and displacement that he must have felt in the coming months are more than I can fathom. A surrounding tribe welcomed him into their fold, but Squanto would forever be displaced from his home and grieving the loss of everyone he held dear because of the greed and arrogance of a few greedy tradesmen and fishermen.
Does his story feel a little bit like a gut-punch to you? It does to me. I can’t get over the injustice of it all. And it’s the rest of his story that continually puts me in awe of his strength and humility after a life of terror and trauma. But before we get to that, we have to back up just a few months.
It is September 6th and the Pilgrims are about to set sail for the New World. They load their food and their families into two rickety ships and begin their journey. They had barely left the harbor when they realized that one of the ships was beginning to take on water. There was no way they could make it across the ocean like that, so they went back. The other ship seemed to be doing fine, so they loaded as many extra people and supplies into the Mayflower as it could hold, and the rest of their friends and loved ones volunteered to stay back and join them in the New World once they were settled. After all this, they set sail again, only to realize that the Mayflower had a major crack in the main beam that needed to be fixed. They had to return to the harbor once again, but instead of waiting months for a proper repair, they stuck a big metal screw in it, and set out again for the New World. The hasty repair held up, but that was the least of their worries moving forward.
There were now 102 people stuffed into a ship they had no confidence in, going 2 miles per hour across a very stormy and tumultuous ocean, and they were already missing loved ones and starting to get sick. Throughout the next few months, diseases like scurvy and dysentery began to overtake the ship’s passengers. It is a wonder that these people had any hope at all after everything they’d already faced.
When they finally got to the shore of Massachusetts it was the beginning of winter, and they were in no shape to do the hard work of starting a colony. So, many of the passengers stayed on the ship while those who felt well enough began to scout out fit places to settle. This was the point where the ship’s crew that had been hired to lead this voyage began to have conflict with the pious puritans. They valued different things and they wanted different things, but they also couldn’t afford to split up with the troubles they were already facing. So they drew up a new contract for each person to sign, which became the first written agreement or constitution of our nation.
As they scouted out good places to settle, they happened upon a patch of land that was already cleared of trees and brush and seemed a perfect place to start their colony. This was the very spot where Squanto’s village once lived. When the Englishmen saw the bones and the remains of the village, they thought that God had wiped the people out to make space for their colony. After so much of their own suffering, it was still with this attitude that they entered into the New World.
It was getting cold and winter was fast approaching. When winter hit, the people could not stay in the ship. So the first building the Pilgrims built in their colony was a common house. And this common house immediately became their hospital for the sick and dying. The food they lived off of that winter was the corn and supplies that they gathered from digging up Native American graves. They also were understandably attacked by surrounding Native American people several times. This was a shock to both parties. The Englishmen did not have men enough or strength enough to fight these warriors, but the warriors did not have weapons strong enough or swift enough to counteract the rifles and bullets of the Englishmen. The pilgrims did despicable things in those desperate months just to survive. At one point, so many people were sick or dying that there weren’t enough healthy people left with enough strength to bury their dead. So to protect themselves from future attacks, they would drag the dying into the woods and prop them up against trees with rifles in hand to give the appearance of a strong defense, while leaving them to die a treacherous death alone in the cold.
If I were a pilgrim woman in the new colony at this point in time (as I often imagined I was when I was a child as I placed a Thanksgiving napkin on my head to serve as a “pilgrim hat” and gathered imaginary skirts to sit down at Thanksgiving dinner) this would be the point where I gave up completely. If I had any hope left when we’d gotten to this land, it would be lost by midwinter as my friends and family slowly died and I lived in constant fear of being attacked by surrounding peoples. I wonder what desperate prayers were prayed that winter.
Their settlement was completed by February and the 19 families who arrived in the Mayflower now had roots in this new land. By the time the snow had thawed, though, only 47 of the original 102 people were still living. Out of all the couples who had come together, only three were still in tact. Everyone had lost someone. Everyone was grieving. Their numbers were cut in half in one winter. As they did the hard work to create a sustainable colony that spring and summer, they were also processing through the deep trauma of the past few months.
Those who were also processing through trauma were Squanto and the Wampanoag tribe that he had become a part of. Their land had been invaded by people who had a striking resemblance to both the fisherman that wiped out an entire tribe and the greedy tradesmen that kidnapped their people for financial gain. And yet, in an effort to protect their own tribe and maintain peace with powerful allies, they made the brave choice to befriend the Pilgrims. Samoset, a man who had picked up broken English from the English tradesmen, and Squanto, who was fluent, began to teach the Pilgrims about agriculture. The pilgrims were desperate for food and supplies, but they knew nothing about how to grow the new foods they found in the New World. Squanto became a dear friend and invaluable resource to the Pilgrims as they relied on his knowledge of corn, beans, and squash to feed their people. After such a harsh and scarce winter, the pilgrims were relieved to have a bountiful crop when harvest came.
It was fall once again, marking one year after the pilgrim’s arrival. In just those 12 months, they had each fought disease, braved the harsh winter weather, and watched a spouse or child die. They were traumatized, they were grieving, and they were rattled with everything that they had done just to survive the year. Some things they were proud of, others they didn’t even want to write in their history, hoping they would be forgotten by future generations.
But it was the harshness of the previous year that made the blessings seem even more sweet. After feeling such isolation and fear, they were thankful for the friendship that they had with the Wampanoag tribe. The partnership that had formed between the two groups of people out of necessity for their survival had become a comfort when so many of their own family and friends had died. And so, they feasted.
The first written record of the first Thanksgiving was little more than a paragraph, and while our national memory of this holiday may have become inflated and romanticized, the first feast was extraordinary merely because it happened.
Like I said, if anyone had the right to be ungrateful, it was the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. The trauma and loss they had each faced in the previous year was enough to drive anyone into depression and bitterness. They each had a multitude of reasons to turn against each other and let a hatred for the other fester in their hearts. They could have turned to violence. They could have turned to despair. They could have let the events of the year turn them away from God or let them doubt His goodness. But instead, they gathered together in gratitude. They were thankful.
I don’t know about you, but the mere fact that the first Thanksgiving happened baffles me. It would have been so easy to grumble and complain instead. It would have been only natural to weep at the thought of all the loved ones who had been there a year ago, but had died since. It would have been completely justified for hatred of each other to take hold after the injustices that had occurred. But instead, grace was offered and a community was formed between two unlikely groups of people. And it was the grace offered by Squanto and the Wampanoag that is why we are even still here. Without Squanto’s help, the Pilgrims easily could have died before two years had passed.
So if you are dreading a meal filled with family conflict, if you are grieving the loss of people who had been here a year before, or if you are feeling like home will never truly feel like home – you are not alone. These realities were felt deeply on that first Thanksgiving day. Being grateful does not negate the suffering you have faced, but makes the blessings that much sweeter. Much like the first Thanksgiving feasters, we can give thanks that we even made it through the year. We are here and God has not left us, and for that we can be thankful.
