What Do You Know About Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is here and we all think it's  Pilgrims, Indians and Turkey.  You may be surprised that it wasn't, they didn't even call themselves Pilgrims, they called themselves "First Comers or Saints."  Pilgrims came form a book that William Bradford wrote many years after the Mayflower landed.  He referred to the settlers as Pilgrims because a pilgrim is someone who takes a long journey.  The true first pilgrims were French and landed 50 years before the Mayflower in Jacksonville Fl (although it wasn't called that then.)

They didn't eat turkey either for their first Thanksgiving.  It was lobster, cod, haddock and venison.  It was kinda like a colonial surf and turf.  Did you know that they didn't wear black clothes or shoes with silver buckles?  It was blue, green and purple clothes.  They wore the good black clothes on the Sabbath, like we do today.  They never wore buckles, that was made up by artists later.

Finally did you know that about half of the 102 people on the Mayflower weren't "Pilgrims" either.  The others were called "Strangers" and just wanted to come to the New World. I also found out that the Pilgrims weren't the first to celebrate Thanksgiving in America. It was English and Spanish settlers, guess we should have english muffins and spanish rice instead.

I know this won't take away from Thanksgiving and it shouldn't.  It's important that we are thankful for what we have and hope for a good football game on Thursday (for me it's the Washington/Dallas game).  By the way, if you'd like to find out more about Thanksgiving or any other holiday, a great book is "Don't Know Much About History" by Kenneth C Davis.