something as simple and classic as stuffing a bird!

Thanksgiving started after an autumn harvest when Indians on the east coast of the North American continent joined together with settlers to celebrate their bounty. Originally the settlers had invited two Indians and their families to join them for a harvest meal. When the Indians showed up with 90 of their brethren(family meant everyone to Indians) it became apparent that the settlers would not have enough food for all. The Indians recognized the deficit and went back to their dwelling and loaded up on deer, fish, corn bread and other assorted food stuffs that would see the group through three days of eating.

And so, the Thanksgiving we celebrate started during a time when Indians(Wampanoag) and settlers(Puritans) recognized that they could interact and cooperate.

What a concept!

Unfortunately it is not quite accurate.

We inhabitants of this great land have difficulty with the truth, even today.

And so customized for your personal taste. i 'm laying out a menu prepared by historians anxious to have parts of the myth exploded

Here's the menu:

The settlers founded their town on the site of the Indians summer village that they had abandoned when small pox decimated their tribe. That first winter was tough and without two Indians help they may never have survived for Squanto and his friend taught the Puritans what to eat, what to hunt, and what to avoid. They taught them how to build shelter and how to survive the harsh winter.

The settler's thought the Indians heathens for they didn't believe in the God of the Puritans. They didn't live the way the Puritans thought "right".

I'll bet you didn't know that the Puritans had left Europe believing that Armageddon was approaching. They believed ,as it said in Revelation, that they were the seeds of a new "Holy Kingdom". They came by the boat load to inhabit and transform this land for "God".

According to the Fourth World Documentation Project the Pilgrims did whatever they could to hasten this, including removing Indians.

Here is a piece quoted directly from the Project.

The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees from religious persecution. They were victims of bigotry in England, but some of them were themselves religious bigots by our modern standards. The Puritans and the Pilgrims saw themselves as the "Chosen Elect" mentioned in the book of Revelation. They strove to "purify" first themselves and then everyone else of everything they did not accept in their own interpretation of scripture. Later New England Puritans used any means, including deceptions, treachery, torture, war, and genocide to achieve that end.(4) They saw themselves as fighting a holy war against Satan, and everyone who disagreed with them was the enemy. This rigid fundamentalism was transmitted to America by the Plymouth colonists, and it sheds a very different light on the "Pilgrim" image we have of them. This is best illustrated in the written text of the Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in 1623 by "Mather the Elder." In it, Mather the Elder gave special thanks to God for the devastating plague of smallpox which wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag Indians who had been their benefactors. He praised God for destroying "chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way for a better growth", i.e., the Pilgrims.(5) In as much as these Indians were the Pilgrim's benefactors, and Squanto, in particular, was the instrument of their salvation that first year, how are we to interpret this apparent callousness towards their misfortune? The Wampanoag Indians were not the "friendly savages" some of us were told about when we were in the primary grades. Nor were they invited out of the goodness of the Pilgrims' hearts to share the fruits of the Pilgrims' harvest in a demonstration of Christian charity and interracial brotherhood. The Wampanoag were members of a widespread confederacy of Algonkian-speaking peoples known as the League of the Delaware. For six hundred years they had been defending themselves from my other ancestors, the Iroquois, and for the last hundred years they had also had encounters with European fishermen and explorers but especially with European slavers, who had been raiding their coastal villages.(6) They knew something of the power of the white people, and they did not fully trust them. But their religion taught that they were to give charity to the helpless and hospitality to anyone who came to them with empty hands.(7) Also, Squanto, the Indian hero of the Thanksgiving story, had a very real love for a British explorer named John Weymouth, who had become a second father to him several years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth. Clearly, Squanto saw these Pilgrims as Weymouth's people.(8) To the Pilgrims the Indians were heathens and, therefore, the natural instruments of the Devil. Squanto, as the only educated and baptized Christian among the Wampanoag, was seen as merely an instrument of God, set in the wilderness to provide for the survival of His chosen people, the Pilgrims. The Indians were comparatively powerful and, therefore, dangerous; and they were to be courted until the next ships arrived with more Pilgrim colonists and the balance of power shifted. The Wampanoag were actually invited to that Thanksgiving feast for the purpose of negotiating a treaty that would secure the lands of the Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims. It should also be noted that the INDIANS, possibly out of a sense of charity toward their hosts, ended up bringing the majority of the food for the feast.(9)
Today these uncomfortable truths are ignored as we celebrate a different Thanksgiving. This week people all over the country will have prepared their food lists, found the ingredients, filled their carts and rolled to the check out stand. All those savvy shopper items are stuffed in the backs of cars and transported to kitchens all over America.

Tomorrow all those endless decisions, all the beloved foods from long ago, will find their way to dining room tables everywhere for this is a time to "remember".

Even knowing the "truth" about Thanksgiving it is still my all time favorite holiday of the year. What i like to remember is that Thanksgiving requires no "gifts' just sharing.

So in the spirit of sharing, remember that the Wampanoag's religion taught that they were to give charity to the helpless and hospitality to anyone who came to them with empty hands.

Have a lovely Thanksgiving.