Thanksgiving Revisited

Thanksgiving: It's not quite the same holiday that I was brought up with in the 50's -- a holiday replete with yellow, orange and brown crepe paper; self-basting turkeys that had been injected with who-knows-what kind of chemical concoctions designed to make them tender and juicy; and the Disneyesque drama of a small religious society fleeing oppression in England and being greeted by Indians who succored the immigrants and celebrated their survival in an autumn feast.

We now know that the Pilgrims were the branch of the Puritans who had given up on overthrowing the King of England (which the ones who stayed were ultimately successful in doing) and had come to America to set up an independent theocracy.

We know that the Pilgrims asked the Wampanoag Indians to their Thanksgiving feast for the express purpose of negotiating a treaty that would grant the Pilgrims ownership of the Plymouth Plantation.

We know that the Wampanoag leaders were invited to bring their "families," but the extended family that showed up -- about 90 people was not exactly what the Pilgrims (locked in their more stingy definition of family) had
in mind.

The surprised Pilgrims didn't have nearly enough food. So, the Wampanoags generously went home and returned with enough food for a three-day feast. We know that while the Wampanoag women sat with the men at the feast; the Puritan women stood behind the table serving the men.

We know that the Puritans considered themselves the "Chosen Elect" and though they themselves had faced religious bigotry, the Puritans themselves became the bigots, casting themselves as the purifying agents for an imminent Armageddon.

This zeal to suppress those who had a different view of the world led Mather the Elder to give special thanks to god for the plague of smallpox that later devastated the Wampanoags -- the people who had come to the aid of the Puritans in their first desperate year in America.

In the following decades the Puritans exterminated, drove into Canada, or sold into slavery most of the Indians still living in New England. (This slave trade with the southern colonies proved so profitable that some Puritans went on to help develop the African slave trade.)

It's enough to make you go looking for a new holiday. Yet there is something remarkably enduring about Thanksgiving and perhaps that's because it has little to do with the sanitized myth of starving Pilgrims and still less
to do with the reality of the "First Thanksgiving."

After all, the "First Thanksgiving" was not the first Thanksgiving at all. Indeed, for the Wampanoag people, the autumn thanksgiving feast was one of six held in a year -- each marking a change in the season. And around the world, nearly all cultures mark the time of harvest as a time to celebrate our links to our fellow beings and the earth.

The celebration of the harvest can also be an opportunity to think about what it is in one's life that gives meaning and satisfaction.

For many of us, the meaning in our lives comes from actions we take that, in some small way, make the world a little better place.

As for satisfaction, many of us would probably agree with Wendell Berry, who says that satisfaction comes from "contact with the materials and lives of this world, from mutual dependence of creatures upon one another, from fellow feeling."

With this in mind, we would like to give thanks to all the Co-op members and shoppers who continue to support their Co-op with their patronage.

We also would like to thank the member/volunteers who have given the gift of their time in the past year: to work in the schools we partner with; to do the Co-op's recycling and mail out this newsletter; to shop for and deliver food to those who are homebound; to staff events at which we can gather and enjoy one another society; and to educate us about the importance of maintaining the diversity of life which allows this planet to sustain us all.