The First Thanksgiving: A Tale of Squanto of The Dawn Land

By Fr. Gordon J. MacRae

(These Stone Walls)  Editor’s note: Presuming that many TSW readers in the United States, at least, are immersed in the national Thanksgiving holiday this week, These Stone Walls is repeating its traditional Thanksgiving post and its moving tale of Squanto of the Dawn Land. We hope readers will make this a part of their Thanksgiving tradition and will share it with others. May the Lord bless you and keep you as we express our thanks.

“The True Story of Thanksgiving: Squanto, the Pilgrims, and the Pope” is one of our most widely read and most often reproduced posts on These Stone Walls where it has become a sort of Thanksgiving tradition. Some readers told me last year that they handed out copies to the guests at their Thanksgiving table. Others sent links to everyone they know. The tale that post tells is not at all like the story of the first Thanksgiving in America that our grade school history books told. It’s a story of real pilgrimage, and it’s the truth.

It’s a truth, however, that has an even better Thanksgiving story than the one we knew – or thought we knew. The tale’s hero is the Native American, Tisquantum – aka “Squanto” – from a place on the shores of Massachusetts his people called “The Dawn Land.” The winds of change and the gravity of grace required much from Squanto before he stepped into the lives of the Puritan Pilgrims we are accustomed to honoring on Thanksgiving. The short of it is that Squanto rescued them from annihilation.

Here in the heart of New England, from where I write this post in a prison cell, there are some who take great personal pride in having ancestors who arrived aboard the Mayflower. For them, I offer my apologies in advance. This true story of Thanksgiving sweeps out to sea many of their prideful notions about the Mayflower Pilgrims, about heroism and endurance, about manifest destiny, and about the chain of events that enabled the Pilgrims to survive.

The story we learned as children about the Puritan Pilgrims who “fled religious persecution” for a journey to New England aboard the Mayflower in 1620 indeed has some elements of truth, but it wasn’t the whole truth. The Native Americans – who preceded Europeans to New England shores hundreds of years earlier – were presented in our historical accounts as “savages,” dwarfed in stature by the technological advances of the arriving Europeans aboard the Mayflower. Historian Charles C. Mann countered that view in “Native Intelligence,” a fascinating article in Smithsonian magazine (December 2005). Mann described the Pilgrims’ 1620 arrival from the point of view of the local Wampanoag:

“Europeans had been visiting New England for at least a century. Shorter than the Natives, oddly dressed and often unbearably dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped out of bristly, animal-like hair that encased their faces. They were irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery, and often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like basic tasks.”

There’s a far greater tale of pilgrimage and thanksgiving embedded in the story of the Pilgrims and the Mayflower, and it’s a tale that I can relate to far more than that of the Puritans. In the story of Squanto, I encounter a hero who does the right thing in the most awful of conditions, and sometimes with even the most awful of motives. His home, called The Dawn Land, was destroyed by the same forces of history that so radically altered his life... (continued)

Read More at These Stone Walls

 Link:

• The First Thanksgiving: A Tale of Squanto of The Dawn Land 

Related:

• Fr. Gordon MacRae: Federal Court to Hear Oral Arguments in Habeas Corpus Appeal

When Christmas Was Banned in Massachusetts

By Kevin Seamus Hasson

(The Wall Street Journal) Does it sometimes seem as if the Christmas wars—namely the battle between secularists and believers over how and where Christmas and Hanukkah (not to mention other faiths' holidays) should be recognized—have been around forever? If so, you're not far off. The opening shots of the war, at least in America, were fired in Plymouth Colony itself. And after nearly 400 years, it's past time we learned our lesson and ceased hostilities.

Both factions still make the same fundamental mistake the Pilgrims did in Plymouth Colony. In Plymouth, culture was served up in one simple, strong flavor: Pilgrim. The Pilgrims were in charge and they knew it. Dissidents, and they were few, were not allowed to voice their dissent, let alone protest.

The contrast between October and December 1621 in Plymouth is a telling illustration of culture Pilgrim-style. In October, the Pilgrims held what has come to be called the First Thanksgiving. It lasted several days, featuring marksmanship and other contests in addition to good food. In short, it was about as communal and festive as the Pilgrims could ever be. Two months later, however, on "the day called Christmas Day," their leader, Governor William Bradford, recorded in his journal that he "called them out to work."

That was normal. For the Pilgrims, Dec. 25 was a day just like any other. Christmas, they thought, was a "papist" invention. Unlike their feast days, they couldn't find it in the Bible, so they wouldn't celebrate it. The previous year, they had spent their first Christmas in Plymouth splitting lumber.

But a year later not everyone agreed. Some newly arrived colonists objected that "it went against their consciences to work" on Christmas. So Bradford grudgingly excused them "till they were better informed" and led the wiser, more veteran colonists away to work. Returning at noon, however, he was horrified to discover the newcomers "in the street at play, openly" engaged in various sports.

In other words, the newcomers were doing exactly what the Pilgrims had done two months earlier. But this was different. This was no Pilgrim-proclaimed holiday. This was that dangerous innovation—Christ's Mass.
The governor knew what he had to do. He confiscated their sports equipment, telling them that if they insisted on celebrating Christmas as a "matter of devotion" they could do so privately at home, "but there should be no gaming or reveling in the streets." It was no isolated tantrum. A generation later, the colony formally outlawed Christmas for 22 years.

The double standard was blatant. Only two months before they suppressed the Christmas revelers, the Pilgrims had held their own "gaming and reveling" for Thanksgiving. They knew well that it's only natural for people to want to celebrate special times together. A holiday spent in enforced privacy is not much of a holiday at all.

Suppressing the Christmas revelers was obviously a cruel thing to do. But here we are, nearly 400 years later, still debating whether to allow religious holidays out in public or, God forbid, on public property. Some alarmists fear public display of any faith tradition but their own. Others seek to paper over the nation's diversity of traditions by insisting on a homogenized, religion-free culture. (If they had lived in Plymouth Colony, no doubt their answer to Christmas would have been to ban Thanksgiving, too.)

All the alarmists agree on this much, though: Others' holiday celebrations are tolerable only in private, and never in the public square—a vintage 1621 solution. "Ah, but you see," they all say, "religion in public is uniquely divisive. That's why the Constitution restricts it."

Nonsense. Elsewhere in the world, people fight and even slaughter each other over ethnic differences at least as much as they do over religious ones. And our Constitution bars government ethnic preferences just as stringently as it does religious ones. Yet our courts are not clogged with English-Americans seeking to enjoin St. Patrick's Day parades. It's obvious that municipal embrace and even sponsorship of them is not a harbinger of ethnic cleansing to come. It's simply government acknowledgment of one of many ethnic elements in our culture.

There's no reason—constitutional or otherwise—why governments cannot do the same and welcome public displays of menorahs, Christmas trees, nativity scenes and the like as simply some of the many religious elements in our culture.

Four hundred years is plenty long enough. Let's climb out of the 17th century and call a halt to the Christmas wars.

Mr. Hasson is the founder of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the author of "The Right to be Wrong: Ending the Culture War Over Religion in America" (Image, 2012), from which this is adapted.

Link:

• When Christmas Was Banned in Massachusetts 

Related:

• The First Thanksgiving: A Tale of Squanto of The Dawn Land

The First Thanksgiving: A Tale of Squanto of The Dawn Land

By Father Gordon J. MacRae

The True Story of Thanksgiving: Squanto, the Pilgrims, and the Pope” is one of our most widely read and most often reproduced posts on These Stone Walls where it has become a sort of Thanksgiving tradition. Some readers told me last year that they handed out copies to the guests at their Thanksgiving table. Others sent links to everyone they know. The tale that post tells is not at all like the story of the first Thanksgiving in America that our grade school history books told. It’s a story of real pilgrimage, and it’s the truth.

It’s a truth, however, that has an even better Thanksgiving story than the one we knew – or thought we knew. The tale’s hero is the Native American, Tisquantum – aka “Squanto” – from a place on the shores of Massachusetts his people called “The Dawn Land.” The winds of change and the gravity of grace required much from Squanto before he stepped into the lives of the Puritan Pilgrims we are accustomed to honoring on Thanksgiving. The short of it is that Squanto rescued them from annihilation... (continued)

Read More at These Stone Walls

Link:

• The First Thanksgiving: A Tale of Squanto of The Dawn Land

Related:

• The True Story of Thanksgiving: Squanto, the Pilgrims, and the Pope

Thanksgiving Haiku

By Swissmiss

Hey, Gobble Gobble!

Make haste and get on my plate

Spicy pumpkin pie

Read More

• Hump day before Thanksgiving Haiku

The Best Thanksgiving

Turkeys for Thanksgiving - as friends, not feast

"At Karen Dawn's Thanksgiving feast, there will be yams and stuffing with cranberries and a dessert of pumpkin-pecan pie, all set out on a table for eight.

And there will be turkeys, two of them actually -- Emily and Bruce (or possibly Brucilla -- it's a little unclear). The two 20-pounders will have most of the privileges of Dawn's other sentient guests -- a Pacific Palisades patio, a view of the ocean and vegetarian nibbles.

At Dawn's vegan holiday dinner, guests will ooh and aah over live birds. The only turkey plunked down on her table will be Wild Turkey bourbon..."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-vegan.....

Thanksgiving Egg Cake (not what you're thinking)