The "First" Thanksgiving Actually Comes at the End

Here's Caleb Johnson's MayflowerHistory.com site, which includes a review of last night's Desperate Crossing, the three-hour (with commercials) documentary re-inactment of the Pilgrims, beginning with their move to Leyden in the Netherlands to escape the wrath of the King of England and ending with "the first Thanksgiving," which, as has been pointed out on many sites, really has nothing to do with what the Pilgrims would have considered a "thanksgiving," which was a day of prayer and fasting. The scene we re-inact today is what the Pilgrims would have known as a harvest festival or "Harvest Home."

Plymouth Rock? No one even remembered it until 1841 when an elderly man claimed that the big rock the citizens of Plymouth were about to build a wharf over was, according to his grandfather, who heard it from his grandfather, where the Pilgrims had stepped off the Mayflower in 1620 (actually, they came ashore in small boats). The Rock actually remained in the wharf until Victorian-era Americans, venerating the Pilgrim forefathers, extracted it (and broke it in half). Most of the cute little myths we believe about Thanksgiving were actually created by the Victorians, including the black Pilgrim hat that still serves as a symbol for the Massachusetts Turnpike and the big-buckle shoes and the legend of how popcorn was first eaten at the feast attended by the surviving Pilgrims and Massasoit's Wampanoug tribe.

I recorded the whole thing which is a good thing because I missed a lot fussing over that frelling gas log with James. I did enjoy what I saw, although I wonder if the real Pilgrims (and "Strangers") actually did use the very formal forms of speech you often heard in the program. Johnson comments about several scenes sounding stage-y.

(Music Listening To: Windham Hill, "Thanksgiving," specifically that very American hymn, "Simple Gifts.")