November

Thanksgiving is the Fourth Thursday of November

Archaeologists believe that feasting is one of humanity's most universal and unique social behaviors. Researchers theorize that feasts may have played a significant role in easing the potentially rocky transition from a hunting-gathering lifestyle to one of agricultural dependency. Feasts help integrate communities by providing a sense of community. The earliest feasts were probably funeral feasts, which brought communities together to mark the last event in a person's life and send the deceased off to another life.

The holiday we celebrate as Thanksgiving is a harvest feast. All over the world, throughout history, people have celebrated the end of the hard work of harvest by feasting on the fruits of their labor. Our tradition is to commemmorate the Pilgrims' Thanksgiving feast at Plymouth Plantation in 1621, but before that, Spanish settlers had celebrated a Thanksgiving in 1565, in what is now Saint Augustine, Florida. For thousands of years earlier, the people who were here before either group of settlers arrived had been holding similar feasts to celebrate the harvest. One such celebration was the Green Corn Ceremony, or Busk, celebrated by Oklahoma's Muskogee tribe. Read more in this lesson: Thanksgiving: Celebrating the Harvest.

• Write a recipe for their favorite Thanksgiving dish.
• Write a menu for your ideal celebration feast.
• Make a list of your favorite Thanksgiving foods. Choose five and write a story or poem that includes all five.

The Pilgrims' Thanksgiving

We do not know the exact date of the celebration we now call the First Thanksgiving, but it was probably in late September or early October, soon after their crop of corn, squash, beans, barley, and peas had been harvested. It was also a time during which Plymouth Harbor played host to a tremendous number of migrating birds, particularly ducks and geese, and [William] Bradford ordered four men to go out "fowling." It took only a few hours for Plymouth's hunters to kill enough ducks and geese to feed the settlement for a week. Now that they had 'gathered the fruits of our labors," Bradford declared it time to 'rejoice together...after a special manner.'

...Countless Victorian-era engravings notwithstanding, the Pilgrims did not spend the day sitting around a long table draped with a white linen cloth, clasping each other's hands in prayer as a few curious Indians looked on. Instead of an English affair, the First Thanksgiving soon became an overwhlmingly Native celebration when Massasoit and a hundred Pokanokets (more than twice the entire English population of Plymouth) arrived at the settlement and soon provided five freshly killed deer....most of the celebrants stood, squatted, or sat on the ground as they clustered around outdoor fires, where the deer and birds turned on wooden spits and where pottages—stews into which varieties of meats and vegetables were thrown—simmered invitingly.

In addition to ducks and deer, there was, according to Bradford, a 'good store of wild turkeys' in the fall of 1621...The Pilgrims may have also added fish to their meal of birds and deer...Alas, the Pilgrims were without pumpkin pies or cranberry sauce. There were also no forks, which did not appear at Plymouth until the last decades of the seventeenth century. The Pilgrims ate with their fingers and their knives.

From Philbrick, Nathaniel, Mayflower, Penguin, 2006.

First Thanksgiving, 1914 by Jennie Brownscombe

Based on what you read above, how is this picture different from how the Pilgrim's Thanksgiving probably really looked? Draw your own picture.