Do you know your Turkey day facts?

Today is Thanksgiving Day! Yippee!!

This past week at my elementary school, many of our teachers have been doing Thanksgiving lessons. I started thinking about how different Thanksgiving is taught today than when I was in elementary school.

For example, when I was in school, we were taught that the Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth Rock, a part of America that they discovered.

We were not taught that the Pilgrims were religious zealot refugees kicked out of Holland first, then England in 1620, and that many of them died on the way over here due to sickness. We were not taught that there were TWO ships in fact, but the Godspeed had to turn back because it was leaking.

We were not taught that the Native American tribe that welcomed them to Massachusetts was the Wampanoag tribe, that Squanto was NOT the chief of this tribe (Massoit had this honor), he was just a member of the tribe who knew English. We were also not taught that Squanto had learned his English from a group of fisherman who had sailed into the Cape Cod bay and used Squanto as a guide, in turn, teaching him English, many years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth.
We were not taught that the Wampanoag outnumbered the Pilgrims at the feast (91 Wampanoag to 53 Pilgrims)

We were not taught that the Pilgrims would have all died if the Wampanoag hadn't shown them techniques for farming and which animals to hunt for food. We also weren't taught that a few years after the feast, the Pilgrims began brutally attacking the Wampanoag if they did not allow themselves to be converted to Christianity. A few years later, the Pilgrims destroyed the Wampanoag tribe for good, through both violence and sicknesses that the Pilgrims brought over from England, sicknessess that the Wampanoag had no resistence to.
Happy thanksgiving right?

In fact, Thanksgiving as we know it as a holiday wasn't regularly celebrated by Americans until it was signed into law on October 6, 1941 by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This is all information that is being taught in my school now, and I couldn't be happier. I can't think of a better way to teach than to teach the truth about a major holiday.
Of course, as a history major, I am obliged to add in facts about things. The last paragraph is not taught in schools, but it is information that I learned in a class on Early America.

So when you sit down to enjoy your turkey day dinner, you can impress your family with this (useless?) trivia! And be thankful that the children of America today are not being served lily white tales of hogwash about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving, which by the way, they didn't even call it "thanksgiving", simply, "the feast"


Thankfully yours,
Nay