I wish you all the best this holiday season, whatever your tradition....as for the "Thanksgiving" celebration here in the U.S. and it's origin, I thought this was interesting information (I used to live in St. Augustine, FL)....
The historians at Plymouth Plantation don't say that the event in 1621 was the first Thanksgiving. In fact, that feast was a harvest celebration. The word "thanksgiving" isn't mentioned in any of the historic documents.
They will admit that the 1621 event has created the cultural mythology of what Thanksgiving has come to mean today.
If the definition of Thanksgiving is to mean the coming together of settlers and native people to share in food, the Pilgrims were 56 years too late to make the claim of being the first, according to Michael Gannon, a retired history professor from the University of Florida. In his 1965 book, The Cross in the Sand, he documented an event in 1565 that happened in St. Augustine as the first Thanksgiving.
Upon landing in Florida, Pedro Menendez de Aviles called for a Thanksgiving Mass and a celebratory meal. The native Seloy people were invited to join in.
They probably ate salted pork and garbanzo beans and red wine. There is no record what, if anything, the Seloy may have provided, Gannon said.
And even this event wasn't the first celebration of thanks in the new world by Europeans. Gannon said every group would have had some sort of event to give thanks for a safe voyage.
"The St. Augustine event is the first such ceremony in the first permanent settlement in North America. It is the first where we find the native people sharing a meal with the European visitors," Gannon explained.
So, if this is the case, why do the Pilgrims get all the credit?
"The Spanish settlers have been slighted by history for centuries," Gannon said. 'The reason is not hard to find. The English won out over Spain and France for control of the North American continent.
"It's the English customs, ceremonies and anniversaries as well as laws that come to dominate the mindset of the American people."
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---Maya