Giving thanks, then and now

The First Thanksgiving. — Oil painting, Jean Leon Jerome Ferris (public domain)

When we sit at our heavily laden tables today, family gathered ’round, we’ll already have two things to be grateful for — plenty of food and loved ones with which to share it.

Let’s not start quibbling about how much we hate the turnip side dish or how annoying Aunt Mary is with that yappy little dog she won’t leave at home. Let’s not bring up interpersonal “issues,” complain about our health or launch into a recitation of all that is wrong with the world.

Let’s keep it simple today. If we are warm, fed and in the company of kith and kin, we’re not doing too badly. While it may be more fashionable to carp, analyze or offer advice to those who didn’t ask, to expound, pontificate or lecture, let’s focus on the real intent of Thanksgiving — saying “Thanks!” for what we’ve got.

This is probably the only holiday on the calendar for which food isn’t an accoutrement, but the major point of the day. Thanksgiving is our version of a harvest festival, a day to celebrate the end of the growing season, the bounty of the fields and the cooperation of nature, mother of us all.

You personally may think of the source of all foodstuffs as the nearest supermarket, but when you imagine the labor that brought your feast to the table, be glad you didn’t have to do all the work yourself. If you had to raise the corn for the pudding, rake in the cranberries from the bog, dig the potatoes and carrots, defend the salad greens from the caterpillars and pick the apples for the pie, you wouldn’t think of Mother Nature as some abstract concept.

We humans have called her many things over the millennia — she was Astarte to the Semites, Semele to the Phrygians, Demeter to the Greeks, Ceres to the Romans and Min to the Egyptians. We may not see her form exactly, but we see her hand in the warm sun, the nurturing rain, the fertile soil and the cycles of sowing, tending and reaping that are the same down on the industrial farm and out in every backyard garden patch.

Gardeners are lucky, in a way, that their work keeps them in touch with these most basic things. We join in prayers — often on our knees — that our plants will have the sun and rain they need to come to harvest, that the fruit will not die on the vine or be carried off by varmints.

We Americans are lucky in every way that the land we occupy is temperate, fertile and generous. It is an ingrained assumption that our food supply will never fail, that our land is too large for drought or hail or freeze in one region to leave us all hungry.

Think how it might be to be born in a land of rock and snow, like the misnamed Greenland, where glaciers rule. Or to be stuck in a nation stripped of vegetation and soil, like certain godforsaken parts of India and Africa. If we lived in the harsh desert climate of the Mideast, where water is at a premium, it’s not just our diet that would be different, but our whole lives.

Wild turkey strutting his stuff. — Public domain

We live in a favored land, a land of plenty — plenty to the point of excess. Wherever we come from, we learn to live with the rhythms of the seasons, the comforting vastness of the territory and the soul of land. We claim the rugged cliffs of the Pacific Coast, the snow-capped heights of the Rockies, the rich soils of the Plains and the fertile lowlands of Florida as our own. We are land rich, even when cash poor.

The Pilgrims couldn’t have foreseen what their future would bring when they set sail for the New World in 1620, embarking on a venture from which there was no turning back. It wasn’t an easy time. For 66 days, 102 souls huddled in the hold of the Mayflower before landing at Plymouth Rock just as winter was tightening its grip on the land.

Weakened by the hardships of the trip and the necessity to build shelter, they fell prey to pneumonia and consumption and began to die — one each day, then two, then three. Surrounded by the land’s native people, they buried the dead by night, so the tribes would not see how quickly their numbers were dwindling.

According to Jean Criaghead George in her book “The First Thanksgiving,” there came a time when only seven able-bodied settlers were available to stoke the fires, make the meager meals and tend the sick. By spring, 46 of the original band of 102 were dead.

A Native American of the Wampanoag nation named Squanto was their salvation. Taking pity on the strangers, he lived with the Pilgrims through the next growing season and taught them to live on the land.

He showed them how and what to plant, since the crops they brought from home were not suited to the harder climate of New England. He schooled them in which plants were poisonous and which medicinal, taught them how to build houses like the natives, how to tap maple sap for syrup, how to hunt and how to fish.

When the harvest of 1621 was bountiful, it’s no wonder that gratitude welled up in a feast celebrating Old World labor and New World know-how. It was a new community of survivors from a far land — not more than 46 — and generous natives not yet robbed of their native wealth — a host of more than 90 — that sat down to tables laden with lobster and goose, turkey and venison, duck and pumpkin, fruit and cheese.

I don’t believe the Pilgrims could have sat to the feast without thinking of the hardship they had endured, the terrors of this strange new world, the grief of losing their dearest comrades, spouses, children and parents in a place so far from all that had been familiar. I don’t believe that we sit at our groaning boards today without reflection on the self-same things.

It is our mission, now as then, to endure our times, to live bravely in the face of danger, to remember those who have fallen, and to be thankful for the blessings that come our way. Every day is a new day, with new reasons to be grateful. In this may we humbly trust.