Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
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… Continue reading The Daily: 26 November 2025
All Hallows: An Entanglement Today is All Hallow's Eve, Hallowe'en, with all the sweet treats, riotous good fun, and spooky debauchery that entails. Tomorrow is All Saints Day, All Hallows, a reincarnation of the ancient Irish festival called Samhain, which means “end of summer”. Samhain is one of the few clear remnants from at least… Continue reading The Daily: 31 October 2025
Thanksgiving at Plymouth, oil on canvas by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, 1925 (An early rendition of How Many Things Are Wrong with this Picture) And then there's this... which gets a fairly comprehensive critique here.. to which I would add that nobody dressed like this in early 17th century New England. Nor were stone houses much… Continue reading The Daily: 27 November 2024
I have never been particularly attached to Thanksgiving. It feels all wrong. It is supposedly a harvest festival, but it falls well after the harvest. It is lavished in the colors of autumn — which faded away weeks ago in the real world. It is based on a story that is neither factual nor especially… Continue reading The Daily: 24 November 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 