The Thanksgiving Ceremony
Chapter One
The History of Thanksgiving
What are the first words that leap to mind when you think of Thanksgiving?
Probably the Pilgrims, the Mayflower, Plymouth, turkey, the Indians, 1621, and football-though not necessarily in that order. Less likely are the Vikings; the Spanish; African slaves; 1526; French Protestants; St. Augustine, Florida; New Mexico; the Dutch; the London Company; and Jamestown, Virginia.
The latter all played a role, earlier than the Pilgrims, in the settlement of what was later to become the United States (not to mention 30,000 b.c., the estimated date of America's earliest tribal harvest feasts, many millennia before Columbus stumbled on Western Hemisphere shores).
But traditions have a way of enduring, and the Thanksgiving story we're most familiar with has its roots in the early days of Plymouth Rock, in 1620. To recount this story, we first must start out, as the Pilgrims did, on the other side of the Atlantic. Let's revisit what was happening in England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
A key conflict of the time converged on religious issues-between Rome and "reformers." And given the pa ... read full excerpt from: The Thanksgiving Ceremony ebook
