There is a special celebration that takes place every fourth Thursday of November. This is a national holiday that honours the harvest feast shared by the first settlers and the Native American Indians on the East Coast of America. The celebration is known as Thanksgiving.
Many different Native American tribes lived along the East Coast of the United States. Far up North in the cold region of south-eastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island lived a tribe called the Wampanoag. The native people knew the land well and had fished, hunted, and harvested there for thousands of generations.
A ship carrying 101 men, women, and children sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, there were a lot of strong winds that made the ship land far North on the coast where the Wampanoag lived. The people, known as settlers because they were traveling to a new land to live, were a group of English people who went to a Protestant Church in England, but they wanted to start a new church in another land. They ended up settling the land that is now known as Cape Cod.
As the settlers prepared for winter, they gathered anything they could find, including Wampanoag food that was growing in the fields.
The first spring in the year of 1621, a leader of the Wampanoag, called Squanto, visited the settlers. Squanto helped the settlers grow corn and use fish to fertilize their fields; he could talk to the English in their language. They also had meetings and eventually a formal agreement was made between the settlers and Squanto’s tribe to join together to protect each other from other tribes.
One day that autumn/fall, four settlers were sent to hunt for food for a harvest celebration. The Wampanoag heard gunshots and they thought the English might be preparing for war. Another leader called Massasoit visited the English settlement with 90 of his men to see if the war rumour was true. But after reaching the site where the English colony had settled, they realized that the English were only hunting for the harvest celebration.
Massasoit sent some of his own men to hunt deer for the feast and for three days, the English and native men, women and children ate together. The meal consisted of deer, corn, shellfish, and roasted meat; the foods for this meal were different to today's traditional Thanksgiving feast.
The first feast was not a special religious one although there would have been many prayers offered. The first recorded religious Thanksgiving Day in Plymouth happened two years later in 1623. On this occasion, the colonists gave thanks to God for rain after a two-month drought.
There are many stories surrounding these settlers that have been proven not to be true. These stories are called MYTHS. Believe it or not, the settlers didn't have silver buckles on their shoes. Nor did they wear sombre, black clothing; instead they were dressed in bright and cheerful colours.
The Native Americans were not wearing woven blankets on their shoulders and large, feathered headdresses; this is another myth! Although these settlers are today called Pilgrims, they did not call themselves by that name all those years ago.
What is not a myth is that during the Thanksgiving celebration, the settlers played ball games, sang, and danced and had a lot of fun and they did not eat what has today become a normal Thanksgiving meal, because the food was not available all those years ago. The meal everyone eats these days has evolved over the years.
We can all join in the Thanksgiving tradition this year by giving thanks for all the good things in our lives.
