Happy Thanksgiving

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As a teacher, the conflation of turkeys with the Pilgrims and the "First Thanksgiving" at Plymouth has always frustrated me. We don't know if turkey was served at that feast. So, how did turkeys become such a firmly embedded symbol of Thanksgiving to the point that the holiday is often informally referred to as Turkey Day?

An article by Ethan Trex on the Mental Floss website originally published in November 2013 and updated in November 2020 titled "Why We East What We Eat on Thanksgiving" tells us that while there were wild turkeys in the Plymouth area, they is no evidence of their inclusion in what history has dubbed America's First Thanksgiving.


 

And that brings up another issue I have with Plymouth and the Pilgrims getting credit for the first Thanksgiving. According to Virginia's WTOPNews in an online article from November 2020 by Luke Lukert titled "Who Had The First Thanksgiving? Virginia," the honor of America's first Thanksgiving actually belongs to the residents of Jamestown where, on Berkley Plantation on December 4, 1619, Thanksgiving was celebrated and remained an annual event until the Powhatan Tribe attacked the plantation in 1622. The history of this Thanksgiving was lost until 1958 when documents were discovered by Dr. Lyon Tyler, a former president of William and Mary College.


 

All that Seventeenth Century history aside, the U.S. didn't celebrate Thanksgiving Day as a national holiday until after Governor Bradford's rediscovered journals were reprinted 1858, and a push for a national Thanksgiving holiday gained traction. (https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/20218/why-we-eat-what-we-eat-thanksgiving) Bradford's journals also included a description of hunting wild turkey. Thus did turkey become associated with the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving and, since President Lincoln's declaration of a national holiday in 1863, the turkey as been the protein of choice at the American Thanksgiving Day dinner table.

Whether or not turkey will grace your table this Thanksgiving Day, I wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving.


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