Interesting Thanksgiving Facts

 

    


     Every year, on the fourth Thursday of November, millions of Americans celebrate a federal holiday to watch football and parades and stuff themselves at the dinner table. Here are some facts:
     -Everything we know about the three-day Plymouth gathering comes from a description in a letter written by Edward Winslow, leader of the Plymouth Colony, in 1621, Monac said. The letter had been lost for 200 years and was rediscovered in the 1800s. In 1841, Boston publisher Alexander Young printed Winslow’s brief account of the feast and added his own twist, dubbing the 1621 feast the “First Thanksgiving.”
     -The first Thanksgiving was held in the autumn of 1621 and included 50 Pilgrims and 90 Wampanoag Indians and lasted three days. Many historians believe that only five women were present at that first Thanksgiving, as many women settlers didn’t survive that difficult first year in the U.S.
     -Thanksgiving didn’t become a national holiday until over 200 years later! Sarah Josepha Hale, the woman who actually wrote the classic song “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” convinced President Lincoln in 1863 to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, after writing letters for 17 years campaigning for this to happen.

     -The Pilgrims were a minority of those aboard the “Mayflower” as they traveled to the New World. There were many “strangers” among them, notably the sailors who were providing the skill to sail the ship across the Atlantic. These men, who did not share the religious zeal of their passengers, looked down upon the Pilgrims with contempt.
     -When the pilgrims arrived aboard the Mayflower in 1620, they found the Wampanoag population had been decimated by disease – probably smallpox. Ten years earlier, settlers had sailed up the East Coast of America and found it well populated – making it harder for them to settle and farm successfully. When they arrived, the Wampanoag saw them as potential trade partners and allies against a rival tribe – the Narragansett.

     -The Pilgrims did not stumble upon an unknown frontier when they landed in New England in 1620. The waters off what would later be referred to as Massachusetts had been fished by the English for at least 100 years before the Pilgrims arrived.
     -The first Thanksgiving celebration in the fall of 1621 went on for three days and included 91 Native Americans and 56 settlers. The menu consisted of ducks, geese, lobsters, clams, bass, corn, green vegetables and dried fruit. Also included on the table were venison, watercress, leeks, wild cranberries and boiled pumpkin. “Popped corn” was also eaten at the first Thanksgiving. What did not appear at the first Thanksgiving includes pumpkin pie, bread (as we know it), apple cider, and no milk, butter or cheese since cows had not been brought with them from Europe.
 

     -The Pilgrims did not use forks. They used a knife, spoon, large napkin and their fingers to eat. They would also share both plates and drinking vessels. This provided a means for diseases to spread quickly. Many died or became ill because of this practice which we see, today, as unsafe and unsanitary. Germ theory was at least two centuries in the future.
     -The Pilgrims did not live in log cabins. If there is a picture of them in your textbook living in buildings made of logs, it is wrong. The Pilgrims made their buildings out of hand hewn planks. They had no glass for their windows, and simply covered them with wooden shutters.