The Daily: 26 November 2025

Thanksgiving is not a harvest feast. Puritans were not notably inclined toward feasting. Leadership especially wasn’t, and the accounts we have of their lives is heavily skewed toward the elite men who had the leisure to write things down. Whatever the average New England settler might have thought about celebrating the land’s bounty with merry feasting, what we “know” about these people is that they tended to sneer at such things as merriment and good food and happy gatherings. And harvest feasts would have been entirely too papish and pagan for these folks. So, if there was a feast, it probably wasn’t a Pilgrim idea — though they sure latched on to it as a sign of their presumed divine favor.

I think there probably was a First Thanksgiving, though I doubt it was a harvest feast. The timing is off by a wide margin. Harvesting, even of dried flint corn, would have been long over before early winter cold settled in. Shellfish were in season, and perhaps the year’s nut and mast harvest would have been properly leached and preserved by late November. But Native folks don’t have just one harvest season, so they don’t tend to have harvest celebrations. In sensible cultures, food is grown and gathered all year long. It’s always time to celebrate something.

But don’t think that is what was going on in November of 1621. I suspect this was an Indian attempt at rapprochement, a formal mending of relations through ritual celebration. The story, even in its patchy and skewed preserved form, has all the elements of a potlatch, a gathering that both redistributes wealth and binds a community together. (Unfortunately, it didn’t work… because Puritans…) To me, it seems like the Indians were trying to rebuild settler-indigenous relationships. This was an act of sharing food to say “We forgive you for stealing our seed corn, our lands, our lives. We care about you and want you to thrive. And just see how the Earth provides such bounty!”

Notably, the Indians brought most of the food.

This doesn’t seem to be generally recognized. This is, again, because we only have the elite male Pilgrim perspective, and Pilgrims woefully, willfully, missed crucial aspects of Indian reality. For example, recorded accounts only name the male chiefs and talk about “many warriors” at the gathering, but this could not have been the whole Indian delegation — because, for one thing, there were always both women and men in balanced leadership positions. If the male chiefs showed up, so did the women. Furthermore, there was a relatively firm division of labor. Men mostly did not cook, not even game animals. And women mostly did not hunt, though they were largely in charge of trapping the small game that kept bellies fed most days. Women owned and tended planting fields; they were the fire keepers and fuel gatherers; they were the doctors and herbalists; they were even the builders and fabricators. In short, they were in charge of all care work (some things are constant…). No feast would have been possible without Native women, and no community gathering would have been sanctioned without the women leaders.

And then, where were the children in this celebration? Or the elders? The accounts only talk about male adults in their prime, but there were almost certainly children and elders also. It’s highly unlikely that the adults would go away and leave the elders and infants at home. For one thing, elders, actual old people, were the leaders, unlike in Pilgrim society where the label was a status marker and applied largely to men in middle age. (This being year two, there were no old people among the Pilgrims yet… also very few children…) But more importantly, no Indian leader would have held a feast without feeding all their people, especially hungry children. But we only hear about the chief and the warriors carrying game animals. A lot of game animals. Far more game animals than the gathering could have eaten in a day or ten…

And that, too, leaves out more than it includes in the narrative. Native northeast Turtle Island peoples ate venison, but they ate far more fish and mollusks, especially on the coasts, and they ate even more nuts, grains, beans, roots, and fruits. Their daily diet would have been mostly veg, augmented by preserved animal fat or small game. For a special feast, Wampanoag women would have undoubtedly prepared nasaump, a cornmeal porridge that contained all sorts of nuts and berries and maple syrup. This would be served with corncakes made with cranberries and green onions. Quahogs would have been in season at this time of year, so there would have been mountains of these fat shellfish, one of the staples of New England Natives, possibly alongside a chowder of shellfish and ground corn. There might also have been succotash, a dish of cranberry beans (a brownish, pink-speckled kidney bean with a mildly sweet and nutty flavor and a creamy texture) and corn kernels, but this was more of a summer food, made with fresh corn and beans. Still, it is delicious! And if they were trying to impress, they might have spent a week or so preparing it from rehydrated beans and corn.

But the beans and corn did not leave a lasting impression. This is partly because Europeans were still learning to like these foods and probably didn’t eat much of it, but there was also a more subtle bias in play. The Puritans talked only of the meat brought to the table precisely because it came with the menfolk, not the women, food prep and cooking notwithstanding. Wild game was food that was associated with masculine enterprise, hunting, domination of the natural world. These were foods that merited mention and respect, foods worthy of privileged digestive systems. Veg was what you ate when you were too lowly to merit “real food”. And this is still the attitude within Euro-Western cultures.

Which is why we serve turkey…

Turkey may, indeed, have been on the menu. Northeast peoples definitely ate turkeys. But, ironically, they probably didn’t hunt the turkey. The turkey was one of the very few domesticated animals in Turtle Island. Most indigenous peoples in the western hemisphere didn’t seem to see a need for domestication. They chose to manipulate their environment to favor their favored food animals, letting the animals fend for themselves. This is especially important in the cold regions where storing food for livestock is a massive undertaking — and, truly, sort of a waste of energy. If you are just eating the animals, then let them raise and feed themselves and go hunt what you need when you need it. Domestication is necessary to determining wealth and to trade, but not as useful to providing food for a community because it takes considerable winter feed to feed the food animals, making domestication more than twice the work…

However, selling turkey? Or any meat for sale? Almost has to come from a domesticated animal. This is another reason why we serve turkey. The more prestigious meat on the First Thanksgiving board, venison, comes from an animal that has proven obdurately resistant to domestication and, therefore, marketing. You can’t sell deer meat in quantity. But it might also be just that turkey looks and tastes very like customary food animals for Europeans, the domesticated fowl such as peacocks and swans that were featured in the early courses of nearly all fancy feasts (often stuffed one inside another and reassembled with all their feathers… but I digress…)

Still, I don’t believe the food, recently harvested or otherwise, was the central motive in this First Thanksgiving. I truly believe this was an attempt at diplomacy that missed its target, though “crashed and burned” is probably a better phrase. The sparse accounts that we have from the Pilgrims show that they interpreted this act of human goodwill as an act of god. Their god, acting through the local pagans, delivering sustenance as a sign of favor. After the many disasters and losses of that first year in the wilderness, I’m betting many of them were beginning to doubt their divinely chosen status. Like the seed corn they stole at first landing, they seemed to think that this feast was mana from heaven, not food labored over and prepared with care.

The Puritans were not thankful to the Indians, nor were they especially grateful for food. They were grateful to their god for smiling upon them once again…

Now, when Sarah Jospeha Hale resurrected this quaint story and strong-armed Lincoln into declaring it a national holiday, there was no talk of harvest. There was no talk of food at all. She wanted a gathering of communities, focused on gratitude for life and country. Her goal was to bind the nation together, to give the country a common and uniquely American folk identity through shared custom. Food was incidental. In fact, her original idea, published in the Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1847, was to set aside the day for prayer, not celebration. In her mind, it was literally a day of thanks-giving.

Hale sent her gratitude to the Christian god, though I think, as a long-time advocate for women, she was probably likely to says thanks to the producers of the feast as well. But as we sit down to the feast she largely created, to whom do we give thanks?

This has always been a thorny question, ever since the beginning. The providers of the First Feast would have been grateful to the land, to the bounty of Earth, to the animals that gave their lives, to the plants that sustained all. They would have been immensely thankful for the skills of hunter and gardener, forager and cook. They were thankful for real material goodness, from full bellies to communal fellowship. No esoteric sky gods came between their gratitude and the actual laborers of all species who produced their sustenance and to the people who worked hard to build community and smooth conflict. Which… didn’t work out so well with the newcomers.

And those newcomers? They would have considered giving thanks to the land rank heresy, and, as we can see in their account of the feast, they would not have considered giving thanks to women at all. Acknowledging the labors of women would never have entered their minds, women being mere servitors to the significance of men, decorative at best, mostly an annoyance to be born. The Puritans were thanking their god, though one does feel that there was also an element of self-congratulation in their thanks, a bit of boasting, gratitude as virtue signaling. Because Puritans…

So the unity Sarah sought, one people under god, was elusive from the start. We do not agree on our god, even those nominally of the Christian faith. But most of us don’t follow that faith. To whom do we offer thanks? And for what? Which is perhaps the more pertinent question today.

Here is my litany…

I am grateful that life has placed me in a large and loving family. I am grateful for my parents, my sisters and their beautiful families, my sons. I have wonderful aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. I have ancestors that were largely good people; and hence we, their descendants, are largely good people. Life has made us a good tribe. Mostly.

I am grateful that life has granted me the embodied wisdom and discernment that comes from experience. I have been given awareness, despite the privilege of my skin. With this gift from life I can see what is real, what matters, what is good. I am grateful for memories, most of which are happy, that of a life well-lived. I am grateful for my sense of wonder, of joy, of calm, all bred in the experiences given to me in life. I am grateful that life has made me me. All these fortuitous choices and experiments that led to this embodied life are truly astounding. Not chance, but life organizing itself to make me. And you. And every being in the universe. In one magnificent stream of continual creation. 

I am grateful for love and care from all directions, from all beings. The entire universe loves me. Loves you. Cares that we exist and that we live well — so much so that life has placed us on this planet that meets our every need with exquisite precision and delightful profuseness. We are expressions of that care, of that love. We exist because of that love. We embody and live that care.

Note that my list does not include much in the way of things. I am grateful that I have eked out a life despite living within this rapacious culture, but I am not grateful for the things that it produces. I suspect your list is very similar…

But there is often no specific object of my thanks. I am not grateful to as much as simply full of (somewhat astonished) gratitude. I think I would align with the founders of the original feast. Thankful that Earth, that life, is such a beautiful web of interdependence, that every whim is anticipated, that there are constant surprise gifts. Consider the ability of our eyes to perceive colors and the magnificent array on display in every sunset. Why does that exist? Why can we see it? No reason whatsoever. But it surely merits thankfulness!

Some would see the hand of a creator in such things. But I name it life, the ineffable essence that moves the universe. It is not separate nor separable. It is within all of us. We are, all of us, divine, from the tiniest atom to the vastness of galaxies. We are all creators of and creations within life. So where do we direct thanks? To ourselves? To everything?

When you sit down to give thanks, who do you picture on the receiving end? What are you thankful for? Is this a celebration of the gifts of this wonderful world? Is it a prayer? Is it a meal? And where does the food come from? All the way back to its source. Do you acknowledge that trail of laboring beings? Do you give them thanks? And is thanks enough?

I do think we need this feast to return to its roots, as a potlatch, a bonding redistribution of wealth and full bellies, a rapprochement across the great divides, and a coming together in joy to feed each other. We need something that draws us into community, that builds ties, that creates relationship and memories. Which are the sum of a life, after all. We do not need to say thank you to a deity. We need to live in reciprocity with all those manifest beings sharing our part of the world, giving more than thanks and taking only what we need, in perpetual astonished gratitude that all our needs are anticipated and met by this bountiful world.

We probably don’t need turkey… but a bowlful of nasaump sounds pretty good… 

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The Wednesday Word

for 26 November 2025

gratitude

What does gratitude mean to you? Think about it. If you’d like, send me a quick poem or story… or just a few thoughts. If you really have something to say, maybe enter my Wednesday Word contest on AllPoetry.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025