2021 Home For the Holidays

Page 6 2021 Home for the Holidays Lincoln Daily News November 24, 2021 hanksgiving is a special day of the year for many Americans. The holiday represents to us today the gathering of family for a great feast. Sometime during the event we may recognize that the day was first started by the Pilgrims as they celebrated their first harvest in the new world. What we often leave out is the idea that these people in a new world were there for religious reasons. They had fled from England because the English practice of Christianity and church was being forced upon them, and they found it distasteful. But, it should also be noted, that on the voyage of the Mayflower, only about half of the passengers were truly coming to America for religious freedom. The others were a motley mix of thieves, thugs, and restless people who were curious for a new world and perhaps saw it as a way to make great wealth. The voyage, off to a late start, cost many lives along the way. The passengers grew ill and because they were packed so closely together in the holds of the ship, the illnesses spread, few were spared sickness and many died at sea. What did the pilgrims really eat that first Thanksgiving? By Nila Smith T Continued n While many of the pilgrims, especially those seeking fame and fortune thought that they would be traveling to the land of milk and honey where food fell off trees and into their hands by the bushel and the land was rich and productive, they found that expectation was not correct. Landing in the midst of winter, the hardships the pilgrims faced on land were almost as severe as the hardships they suffered on the Mayflower. Death rates continued to soar. By spring, the number of people settling in the Plymouth area was reduced by half of what had left England the summer before. The Mayflower sailed in the late summer-early fall of 1620, and arrived in America early in the year 1621. The Pilgrims were afraid of the Indians (or as we call them today Native Americans), and had heard that the “savages” hungered to put them all to death. Therefore, when they were approached by friendly, English speaking Squanto, they were stunned. The friendship with the Indian helped the Pilgrims in many ways, and in that first fall on land, they called together a great celebration to acknowledge that they had been blessed in America, had survived and even thrived in that first year.