Give Thanks

When I was a child in the Mountain View Community above Greer, S.C., my parents, my younger sister and I usually gathered at my paternal grandparents’ home for our main Thanksgiving Day meal. My Uncle Fred and Aunt Frances Crain usually met us there.

We were a small family, and “Ma,” my Grandmother Lillian, each year prepared a large chicken – no need for a big turkey. Back then, I thought only rich people ate turkey at Thanksgiving. Of course, before Mountain View Elementary School let out for Thanksgiving holidays in the 1950s, we children feasted on turkey, dressing, gravy and all that stuff in the school lunch room. (In those days at school, a fellow could buy an extra carton of milk for three cents!)

Thanksgiving involves fellowship, and one my warmest memories is of gathering – perhaps we met a day after Thanksgiving – at my Uncle Jay and Aunt Nell Crain’s little house on Groce Meadow Road, not far from Faith Temple. My grandfather and the older men went rabbit hunting that autumn morning and brought back some cottontails. Aunt Nell and the lady folk cooked a huge dishpan of rabbits and dumplings. I fondly remember that day of fellowship.

Some say the Pilgrims, central figures in the “Thanksgiving story” most of us learned about in school, weren’t the first to celebrate “thanksgiving” in America. Native Americans celebrated thanksgiving festivals before Europeans arrived in America, says writer Dennis Rupert. He says the Wampanoag (Indian allies of the Pilgrims) held six thanksgiving festivals each year.

Rupert notes that the first recorded Christian thanksgiving in America occurred in Texas on May 23, 1541, when Spanish explorer, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, and his men held a thanksgiving service after finding food, water, and pasture for their animals in the Panhandle.

On December 4, 1619, two years before the Pilgrims held their Thanksgiving service, a group of 38 English settlers arrived at Berkeley Plantation in what is now Charles City, Virginia. The group’s charter required that the day of arrival be observed yearly as a day of thanksgiving to God. Captain John Woodleaf held the service of thanksgiving. Here is the section of the Charter of Berkley Plantation which specifies the thanksgiving service:

“Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually keept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty god.”

The colonists most likely held thanksgiving services in 1620 and 1621. The colony was wiped out in 1622.

Those early thanksgivings probably did not involve feasting but were religious services of thankfulness to God.

Here are some facts about the “Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving,” the one most of us heard about during our school days:

Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote in his diary that the voyage to America was motivated by “a great hope for advancing the kingdom of Christ.”

The Pilgrims set aground at Plymouth Rock on December 11, 1620. Rupert says their first winter devastated them. He writes, “Weakened by the 7-week voyage and the need to establish housing, they came down with pneumonia and consumption. They began to die – one per day, then two, and sometimes three. They dug graves at night, so that Indians would not see their numbers dwindling. At one point, only seven persons were able to fetch wood, make fires and care for the sick. By spring, they had lost 46 of the 102 who sailed on the Mayflower.”

The Pilgrims needed help, and it came from an English-speaking member of the Wampanoag nation, Squanto. He stayed with the Pilgrims for the next few months and taught them how to survive. The harvest of 1621 was bountiful, and the remaining colonists and over 90 Indian guests celebrated together with a 3-day thanksgiving feast.

Dennis Rupert says, “Our Thanksgiving celebration is a wonderful reminder to ‘give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. His love endures forever’” (1 Chronicles 16:34).