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Thanksgiving Misgivings

© Anita Stratos

Most of us recall rehearsing elementary school plays about the first Thanksgiving, a story about the pilgrims, the Mayflower, and a feast the new settlers shared with the Native Americans of Massachusetts. Well, hold on to your bonnet. The history books are fraught with omissions as well as some outright . . . misconceptions. And it seems modern historians are bursting at the seams, trying to right the historical wrongs. After all, what's a holiday gathering without controversy? Here are some corrected historical myths about Thanksgiving that will get the conversation flowing at your November dinner table.

~The pilgrims were said to have settled on uninhabited land. What about the Native Americans who were already there - you know, those tribes who taught the pilgrims what corn was, and how to grow crops, pretty much saving their lives? One Native American called Squanto even acted as an interpreter for neighboring tribes, like the Patuxet. So much for "uninhabited".

~Legend states that passengers of the Mayflower were mostly old men - this isn't the case. Records showed that there were 22 boys, 20 women and 11 girls among the 104 passengers.

~Did you know that the first Thanksgiving feast didn't occur on the fourth Thursday of November? The original feast took place between September 21 and November 11 in 1621 (it was based on English harvest festivals), and it lasted for three days. Abraham Lincoln is the person who designated the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, and Franklin D. Roosevelt finalized the date as the fourth Thursday of November, which was approved by Congress in 1941.

~The pilgrims didn't wear just black and white clothes! Black and white were Sunday clothes; on a daily basis, women wore colors like red, green, gray, blue, brown and violet, and men wore beige, white, green, black, and brown. Pictures of pilgrims with large buckles on their shoes, hats or belts are also in error, as buckles weren't fashionable until the latter 1600s. Children of both sexes wore gowns and dresses with long sleeves and high necklines up until the age of eight, at which time boys dressed like their fathers and girls like their mothers.

~The pilgrims originally intended to settle in Virginia. "Virginia" in 1621 extended much farther north than the state of Virginia does now. The pilgrims were part of the Virginia Company, which gave them rights to most of the eastern seaboard. "Northern Virginia", where the pilgrims wanted to settle, was actually the Hudson River region of New York State. However, the Mayflower landed in Cape Cod and they couldn't move south because of dangerous seas. It was not, as history declares, a navigational mistake that landed them in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

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