Thanksgiving Facts
Rob who I've linked to yesterday, left a comment with a link to an amazing resource on Thanksgiving myths and facts at his other website, Blue Corn Comics. Here is a taste.
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* Only 35 of the 102 colonists aboard the Mayflower were Pilgrims. Others were fortune-seekers fleeing the depression in Europe or indentured servants.Tomorrow, let us thank the original inhabitants of this land for their generosity toward the illegal immigrants from England.
* The colonists were supposed to join the tobacco plantations in Virginia. They landed in Massachusetts because of a storm or a navigation error, or perhaps because the leaders hijacked the expedition.
* The colonists didn't hack a home out of virgin wilderness, they settled on the already cleared land of Squanto's decimated village, Patuxet. Some of them took the Indians' belongings and even dug up their graves.
* The colonists didn't introduce the idea of celebrating the autumn harvest. The Eastern Indians had held such celebrations for centuries.
* The first Indian-Pilgrim get-together was merely a feast, not a true "thanksgiving," a particular kind of religious observance. The first real Calvinist Thanksgiving occurred in the summer of 1623, when the colonists declared a Thanksgiving holiday after rain saved their crops.
* Thanksgiving wasn't a national holiday until Lincoln made it one to spur patriotism during the Civil War. The Pilgrims weren't included in the tradition until the 1890s.
* Seventeen years after Squanto welcomed the Mayflower's Pilgrims, these Englishmen and their Indian allies burned a Pequot village on the Mystic River in Connecticut while its inhabitants slept.
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Comments
Actually, Chelsey learned the thing about Lincoln at high school, and when she came home and told me, I didn't believe her!