Thanks? Giving?

Today most Americans will take a holiday, ostensibly to give thanks. But most will likely give thanks, as they have in years gone by, by simply eating too much.

It’s an interesting contrast to the time when the original settlers observed their first Thanksgiving. When they did so, it was with less food, less security and less freedom than we have today. Now most people in the West have an almost embarrassing choice of food. And although we may have new concerns about national security, the West enjoys freedoms that are unparalleled in human history. Ironically, some of those freedoms are such that they have the potential to end the free society we now know.

In Engand we celebrate Harvest Festival, where in days gone by they had all kinds of ripe fruits and sheaves of grain on the altar. Nowadays, its dented tins of beans and old cauliflowers that have sat in the fridge too long after being bought in a BOGOF deal at the supermarket. In sunday school as a child, we all sang: "We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land, and it is fed and watered by God's Almighty Hand. . . .” In so doing, we tried to thank God in our own way for His love and His blessings.

This kind of recognition of harvest plenty was in the background of the early settlers at the Plymoth Plantation, when they kept what we think of as the first Thanksgiving in 1621. They had, after all, come from England, so their perspective was what they had learned in church there.

Just under half of the Mayflower's contingent had associated together in Holland as part of a sect of the Puritans known as the English Separatist Church. The other colonists included people from a variety of towns and villages who had simply joined the company in the hope of finding a better future in a new world. Some of these were hired to protect the interests of the London stock company who financed the voyage; others were Puritans who did not consider themselves Separatists.

So it was a diverse group that made it through that first year. Forty-six of the original 102 settlers had died, but the harvest was good. And because the Indians had been particularly helpful teaching how to extract the sap of the maple tree to refine it into syrup and how corn could be 'popped', the two gourps joined together for 3 days for their first harvest celebration of turkey and deer and mashed pumpkin. Most of the food was supplied not by the settlers but by the Indians and when it became plain there would not be enough food, the Indians left the colonists and returned with five deer, which they contributed to the feast.

Sadly, it took only a generation or so before the children and grandchildren of the first settlers and their Indian mentors were killing each other. Other forces had taken over, and the two groups no longer had a friendly relationship. Perhaps it’s a good lesson that the history we are taught is not always the complete picture. It also teaches us that once human nature is involved, the picture becomes much more complicated as to intentions and motivations.

For many Indian people, “Thanksgiving” is a time of mourning, of remembering how a gift of generosity was rewarded by theft of land and seed corn, extermination of many from disease and gun, and near total destruction of many more from forced assimilation. As currently celebrated in this country, “Thanksgiving” is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship.

In these times of global struggles, it may be time to remind ourselves of the destruction and pain we can inflict upon communities and remember those less well off than us and to hope for a better year - next year. Can we be strong enough to learn the truths of our collective past? Can we learn from our mistakes? I hope so.

To my American friends and their families and to members of my family who are a long way away in Colorado, Happy Thanksgiving -