Many
blessings
ago-1621
opinion
mondav. november25, 1974
staff
By Rebecca Brite
Though the meanings of many
holidays celebrated in this country have
been lost in the mazes of commercial
America, the heritage surrounding
Thanksgiving still rings through the din
of cash registers and sales pitches.
Every school child learns the story of
the first Thanksgiving: the Pilgrims'
near-failure in the winter of 1620-21,... '
the spring planting made successful
through the aid of the Pemaquid Indian,
Samoset...the three-day harvest festival
with the Indians and the survival of the
Plymouth, Mass., colony.
But as America sits down to still
bountiful tables on Thanksgiving, 1974,
while world leaders gather to discuss
their starving millions and famine
creeps inexorably over Africa, perhaps a
brief refresher course in American
history is in order.
The bleakness of that first winter in
Plymouth has been so romanticized as to
sound more like a fairy tale than the
agonizing fight for survival it surely
must have been.
The school child learns that the
Pilgrims lost half their number that
winter but how many adults re-member
there were only 102 colonists to begin
with?
Disease caused the loss, the child is
told, but writings from that time show
that more than a few of the 47 who died
took their own lives.
Women, dismayed at the prospect
they faced, threw themselves from the
Mayflower before the tiny ship had even
landed; their surviving sisters formed
"suicide anonymous" groups to dis
courage others from following.
And that legendary landing at
Plymouth Rock four days before Christ
mas, 1620; is the child told, does the
parent remember, that the Mayflower
floated in the Cape Cod waters for more
than a month before the landing, while
the Pilgrims and their companions
decided if they really wanted to
disembark on that god-foresaken piece
of rock? Or that, after the landing, the
ship stayed offshore all winter as the
settlers vacilated between faith and
despair, before finally deciding to stay?
The Mayflower sailed in the spring,
leaving the Pilgrims to bury their dead
and plant seeds above the graves, to
conceal from neighboring Indians the
decimation of the new colony.
Is is any wonder, after such a winter,
that the bounty from that tragic planting
should have occasioned a celebration so
meaningful to Americans that it en
dures, nearly intact, after more than
three and a half centuries?
One would hope the parallel is citar
'or America today. Few families may
sacrifice their Thanksgiving dinners for
world hunger this year and most will
certainly complain about rising food
costs
But maybe some will ptTCive the
poignancy of tne contrast between
plenty and deprivation, and realize that
this year, perhaps as never before since
that first year, there is reason to give
thanks.
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