The First Thanksgiving Celebration in America

Thanksgiving Day is the most distinctively American of all the holidays, because it commemorates the settling of the country by Pilgrims almost 400 years ago. Though the first "national day of thanksgiving" wasn't declared until December 18, 1977, to celebrate a decisive victory of the American revolutionaries at Saratoga, the great feast that serves as a model for the Thanksgiving holiday of today actually took place more than a hundred years earlier.

Celebrations in honor of the bounty of harvest were certainly nothing new in human history, even then. The Hebrews held the Feast of Tabernacles in Biblical times; the ancient Greeks honored their goddess of harvests, Demeter; the Romans held the festival known as Cerealia in honor of Ceres, the goddess of grain. This legacy lived on in the minds of the European settlers newly come to the New World in the early 1600's; and they saw, also, that its values were cherished by many of the land's natives.

These settlers - the Pilgrims of the Mayflower - had been searching for a new home. Some of them were refugees, known as Separatists, who had rebelled against the Church of England. After settling in Holland for a brief period of time, they uprooted themselves once more and sailed west for the New World. That journey took a grievous toll. They landed at Plymouth in December of 1620 - at the onset of winter, when they couldn't plant any crops. They'd exhausted their stores along the way, and many had already died. By the spring of that year, little over half of the original 102 settlers were still alive. They, too, would have died, if not for the help of the Wampanoag Indians.

One of the first Indians to make peace with the settlers was known as Squanto. He taught them how to hunt in the unfamiliar land, and where to fish. Also, he showed them how to plant corn and squash - the first crops, along with barley, that the Pilgrims successfully harvested. It was to celebrate this bountiful harvest, in the fall of 1621, that Governor William Bradford proclaimed the now-renowned three day feast and celebration which the Indians were invited to join in.

Within another fifty years, relations between the Pilgrims and the Indians had degenerated into open war. But that first Thanksgiving celebration marked a time when the new settlers and the natives existed in harmony with one another. Perhaps it was mutual hardship that cemented their friendship for a brief time. A sentiment often expressed during those early festivities was that man is never truly grateful for the good things in life until he has experienced the want of them.