Thanksgiving seems so straightforward pilgrims, Native Americans, turkeys, fun but how much of what you think you know about Thanksgiving is really true? Here are false things everyone believes about Thanksgiving. Every kid with a third-grade education knows the first Thanksgiving was in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621 and that it promptly turned into a beloved annual tradition.
You know, turkeys with big hats that have buckles for some reason. All of that. But actually, that's not exactly true. The Mayflower immigrants did have a celebratory harvest feast in 1621, but according to The New York Times, it wasn't until the 1830s that people in New England claimed a link between that historical event and the totally unrelated annual feast they had been celebrating for years.
The people of Plymouth did have religious events to give thanks for major events like the end of a dry season, but they were days of fasting, not feasting. If you hopped into a time machine and traveled backward to that first Thanksgiving which we now know wasn't actually Thanksgiving and started asking around for the pilgrims, you would have gotten a lot of blank stares. That's because they didn't refer to themselves as pilgrims.
According to History, they called themselves Separatists, or saints. In their own writings, they sometimes referred to themselves as planters. Later settlers called them old comers.
There were a few uses of the word pilgrim in the mid-1600s writings of William Bradford, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but it wasn't until the late 1700s that people started reading those diaries and began applying the name pilgrims to the first English immigrants. So, the first Thanksgiving wasn't called Thanksgiving, and it was celebrated by pilgrims who weren't actually called pilgrims. Makes sense.
Because we think of Thanksgiving as a pilgrim thing, we naturally assume that we aren't just celebrating the things that we as modern humans are thankful for. We're also celebrating the triumphs of the pilgrims. We're remembering their struggle for religious freedom, their perseverance in a hostile new world, their bonds with their new Native American allies, and most of all, their survival through that first long, brutal winter. Except we're actually not celebrating that at all.
What we're really celebrating is the Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg. Thanksgiving was first declared an official annual event in 1863, and it was Abraham Lincoln who did it. And he wasn't thinking back to the trials and tribulations of the Pilgrims. He was thinking about recent events.
The North had just defeated the South at the Battle of Gettysburg, and that's what he wanted America to be thankful for. And since Americans loved time off to eat food, the tradition caught on. Thanks, General George Meade!
One reason we admire the Pilgrims so much is the belief that they came to America to America to find religious freedom, and according to conventional wisdom, when they found it, they celebrated with that first Thanksgiving. Of course, none of that is actually true. That's because the Pilgrims weren't actively facing religious persecution when they decided to come to America. They were already free of it because they'd fled England ten years earlier to settle in the Netherlands. But life in the Netherlands wasn't exactly awesome for the Pilgrims.
According to the Plymouth Plantation, most of the Pilgrims worked long hours in the cloth-drenched trade for very little money. To make matters worse, their kids were starting to think of themselves as Dutch. So, after some soul-searching, the Pilgrims decided to move to America, where there would be religious freedom, but also economic opportunity, as well as the freedom to remain English. They signed on with a company called the Plymouth Company, which promised them passage, plus clothing, tools, and other supplies. In return, the Pilgrims had to send natural resources back to England for a period of seven years.
As a bonus, the Pilgrims pilgrims also got to establish their very own totalitarian religion and use it to argue against religious freedom for everyone else. So yay? So, remember that whole thing about Thanksgiving being a celebration where the pilgrims invited their native allies from the Wampanoag tribe to celebrate their new friendship and mutual respect?
Well, there's another thing that's not necessarily true. According to Indian Country Today, there was some cooperation between the settlers and the Wampanoags, but it wasn't all fun and games. It was mostly based on mutual need. As it turned out, in a big stroke of luck for the English, a terrible epidemic had just through New England right before they arrived. Nobody is quite sure what the disease was, but it killed millions of people, reducing the population by up to 90 percent in a period of just a few years.
So when the Pilgrims arrived, there was a bunch of empty land waiting. In fact, the town of Plymouth was originally a Patuxet village that was left vacant after all the inhabitants died during the plague. There was only one Patuxet left alive, Tisquantum, known today as Squanta, who only survived because he'd been kidnapped and taken to Europe in 1888. as a slave at the time of the epidemic, Tisquantum and the Wampanoags had one thing in common with the Pilgrims they needed friends.
That's because other tribes in the area, like the Narragansetts, hadn't been affected as much by the epidemic and thus suddenly had a military advantage. So an alliance was born between the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims. Despite all that, though, some historians believe that the Wampanoags weren't actually invited to the first harvest feast in 1621. Instead, it's likely that the natives heard the pilgrims firing their muskets. thus beginning that all-too-American tradition of drinking too much at a party and then grabbing a gun. So the natives thought the Pilgrims needed help and crashed the party.
Hey, do you guys think the Pilgrims brought a bottle of Pinot Grigio to the first Thanksgiving? I'll tell you what the Pilgrims did bring. Smallpox. Turkey is so traditional that the mere suggestion of cooking something else on Thanksgiving is usually met with gasp. of scandalized horror, even if it's something sensible, like roast beef or ham.
And we won't even mention those who want to go completely off the Thanksgiving train with something messed up like a turducken. So why is turkey such a tradition on the American table? It has to be because... that's what the pilgrims ate, right? Actually, no.
Or maybe, because they definitely ate a lot of the stuff. But even if turkey was one of those things, then it certainly wasn't the centerpiece of the feast. According to Fortune, that honor goes to venison.
Once they knew what was going on, the Wampanoag reportedly brought five deer to the party. And that was a big deal for the pilgrims, because back in England, it was illegal to hunt deer. It was reserved for the nobility.
So eating venison was a real delicacy. In fact, the pilgrims were actually so excited about being able to eat venison that they were constantly talking about it in letters back home. which was probably irritating to all the hungry relatives in England wishing they could munch on some beer jerky.
There was other stuff on the menu, too, but we can really only guess what those things were. Shellfish, squash, cornbread, berries, and plums are all likely. No potatoes or cranberries, though, and no turkey that we know of.
Here, let go! Oh! Oh!
Dad, what are you trying to do? It's Thanksgiving! I didn't know your girlfriend was a goddamn turkey! It may be a Thanksgiving tradition. but not everyone thinks pumpkin pie is a delicious treat.
In fact, some find pumpkin pie to be downright disgusting. Pumpkin is a squash, the argument goes, and squash does not belong in your dessert, as evidenced by both the taste and the texture. So maybe it will come as a relief to learn that pumpkin pie was not an invention of the Pilgrims, nor is it likely that they ate it at that first harvest feast.
According to What's Cooking America, the Pilgrims didn't have the kind of ovens you'd need to bake a pie, and if they had, those ovens, they almost certainly would have baked something like a berry or plum pie, not pumpkin. Pilgrims did occasionally eat pumpkins because, when you're starving, you know, you'll eat anything. One popular way of eating pumpkin was to slice off the top and fill the insides with milk, honey, and spices, and then bake it in hot ashes, which actually does sound worse than a pumpkin pie. But that's the tradition that probably led to the pumpkin pie as Thanksgiving's undeserved signature dessert. At least modern whipped cream is an upgrade.
grade? According to tradition, every year the President of the United States of America selects a random turkey and pardons it, thus sparing the turkey from being eaten. And according to this same tradition, it has been thus since President Harry S. Truman first jokingly pardoned a turkey back in 1947. A couple of things, though.
Firstly, according to the Truman Library, there's no record at all of this ever happening. Truman, it turns out, was regularly given a gift of turkey by the National Turkey Federation and the Poultry and Egg National Board. but it was usually at Christmas, not Thanksgiving. And far from pardoning it, Truman was known to comment about how he and his family were definitely going to eat it. So where did this tradition actually come from?
While some claim that it was Lincoln who started it by pardoning his son Tad's pet turkey during the Civil War, according to Snopes, it was President Ronald Reagan who first mentioned pardoning a turkey as a joke. His successor, George H.W. Bush, decided to be that guy by taking the joke too far, ...and actually pardoning a real turkey. And this is apparently how the tradition actually started. Ironically, most pardoned Thanksgiving turkeys only live for a couple of years because they're bred to be fat and tasty, which means their bodies aren't usually compatible with life.
When your friends or family groan that they could not possibly help with the dishes because of the turkey coma? Most people just sigh with acceptance, because every armchair scientist knows that the levels of the chemical tryptophan found in turkey is so high that it makes people artificially sleepy. Here's the thing, though.
That's not the whole truth. Sure, turkey has tryptophan, but so do a lot of other foods, like cheese, fish, and eggs. What's different about Thanksgiving is that people eat a ton of food, and besides turkey, they're likely eating all sorts of carbs like mashed potatoes, bread rolls, and stuffing.
When you eat a lot of carbs, your body produces insulin. And the insulin removes amino acids from your body, except for some reason, tryptophan, which then has free reign to party inside your head. Once in your brain, it forms serotonin and melatonin, which is what makes you want to pass out on the couch.
and not do dishes. So it turns out the so-called turkey coma is really caused by everything else on the table, and all you have to do to avoid it is not eat so much. Sorry, turkey breath, but it's time to do your share of the dishes. One popular myth holds that the term Black Friday refers to black ink, because it's the day when merchants finally start to turn a profit after a long, hard, broke rest of the year.
Up until then, supposedly, they've had to do their accounting in red ink. which signifies a loss. But thanks to Americans shopping until they drop in a mad pre-Christmas binge, on Black Friday, all those merchants can finally break out the black pens to mark a profit.
Sounds perfectly capitalistic, but it's also a load of hooey. According to Snopes, the term Black Friday was first sarcastically used in 1951 by employers who were annoyed that their employees always called in sick the day after Thanksgiving. By the 1960s, police were using it, too, to describe the chaos of the first day of the holiday shopping season. And that eventually evolved into the urban legend we have now. Today, of course, no one really cares why it's called Black Friday, as long as there'll be an awesome deal on the new iPhone.
And it's that kind of opportunity for the descendants that the Pilgrims were truly giving thanks for. Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite things are coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.