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Thanksgiving Revisited
In 1621 Captain Miles Standish, the leader of the Pilgrims, invited Squanto, Samoset, Massasoit (the leader of the Wampanoags), and their immediate families to join them for a celebration, but they had no idea how big Indian families could be. As the Thanksgiving feast began, the Pilgrims were overwhelmed at the large turnout of ninety relatives that Squanto and Samoset brought with them. The Pilgrims were not prepared to feed a gathering of people that large for three days.
Seeing this, Massasoit gave orders to his men within the first hour of his arrival to go home and get more food. Thus it happened that the Indians supplied the majority of the food: Five deer, many wild turkeys, fish, beans, squash, corn soup, corn bread, and berries.
Captain Standish sat at one end of a long table and the Clan Chief Massasoit sat at the other end. For the first time the Wampanoag people were sitting at a table to eat instead of on mats or furs spread on the ground. The Indian women sat together with the Indian men to eat. The Pilgrim women, however, stood quietly behind the table and waited until after their men had eaten, since that was their custom. Fortunately, this is one custom that has been lost over the years !!!
According to scholars of Thanksgiving history, this autumn harvest festival which has become a time of overeating, dancing, drinking and merriment, all of which was strictly forbidden by the pilgrims' puritanical religion at the time. Celebration in today's tradition would have doomed all of the participants to an eternal life in purgatory or a life of wearing those ridiculous costumes with buckles on their shoes, which ever, they individually deemed harsher.
All of us at Dalton Electric wish you a blessed and fulfilling Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving Chuckles
If April shower bring May flowers, what do Mayflowers bring? Pilgrims and furniture. Why don't you let a turkey get near corn? Because they will gobble, gobble, gobble it.
- What do you call the age of a pilgrim? Pilgrimage.
- What kind of cars would pilgrims drive today? Plymouth.
- What kind of tan did pilgrims get at the beach? Puritan.
- What kind of face does a pilgrim make when he's in pain? Pil-grimace.
- What's the smallest unit of measurement in the pilgrim cookbook? Pilgram.
- What's a pilgrim's mother called? Pilgranny.
- What do you call a pilgrims vocabulary? Pilgrammar.
- What do you call the evil being that comes to get pilgrims? PilGrim Reaper.
- If you call a large turkey a gobbler what do you call a small one? Goblet.
- What was the turkey suspected of? Fowl play.
- Hear about the turkey that evaded the Indian? It had an arrow escape.
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