The "Thanksgiving" menu has been mentioned in a couple of posts. What Bradford said was this: "They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion." (_Of Plymouth Plantation_, NY, 1967, p. 90) That's the food they had on hand, there was no grocery store in the neighborhood, so I suppose that's what they ate on this "first Thanksgiving." It is interesting that Bradford and presumably the rest of the settlers seem to have considered the conventional diet of the seventeenth-century Englishman to have been the standard of a healthful diet, whereas a current day nutritionist would would look on what the English of the day ate with fear and loathing and would, I think, tell us that what the Plymouth colonists ate was far more healthful. In an earlier post I quoted Bradford as being surprised that the colonists who ate such a coarse diet should have lived so long--today we would say that was one of the reasons they did live so long. Two other things for those who have the patience. First, the "first Thanksgiving" is something that is in continual dispute among people who want to be literal about it. I personally cannot imagine that there has ever been a human culture which held a belief in a supreme being which did not have some sort of ritualized celebration of thanks. The Thanksgiving of our culture probably is the product of many influences, some of which can be traced and others not. The food industry certainly has something to do with it. The AFL does pretty well by it. The politics of the Civil War had something to do with it--here is part of Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation which many think of as the "official" origin of our Thanksgiving: "It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people. I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union." Now some may point out that this proclamation was made at a time when things didn't look too good for the Union, and that an observance which stressed "one heart" and "one voice" of the "whole American people," and which conspicuously brought God into the mix might have some political utility. But surely Lincoln did yearn for peace and healing and it is easier for me to believe that this proclamation is sincere than to believe that it was founded solely in cynical political motivations. The point is that Thanksgiving is an accumulation of many currents of meanin gs and feelings. It is a symbolic holiday, and symbols tend to be fuzzy and imprecise and have their roots in many different things, all of which come together in the symbol. We Mayflower descendants, who, not to be too delicate about it, have been thought of with some justice as being a group sometimes more concerned with exclusiveness than inclusiveness, perhaps ought to be thankful that our countrymen are so willing to, speaking figuratively, invite us to the national Thanksgiving feast and to recognize that in terms of ideas if not genetics, every American is a Mayflower descendant, as every American is a descendant in his ideas and values and shared mythology of so many other cultures. Second thing. A couple of my posts have had to do with the religious beliefs of the Pilgrims. Obviously I'm not trying to promote any particular beliefs. Their religion mattered to these people. They were living a desperate life in a dangerous, harsh, and what had to be an almost unbearably lonely place because of their religion. Again and again they left what could have been a comfortable life had they simply gone along with the population as a whole and went off into terribly perilous situations. How could it matter so much to them, and how could it matter so much to the people they were escaping that the powers in England would be willing to arrest, and even execute in ways that we don't want to think about, people for their ideas? It seems to me that it is clear on the face of it that it was religion that literally "set these people apart," and to try to understand them and how they understood the meaning of their world we need to try to understand their religion. At the same time it should be remembered that not all the settlers were of the church, and there may have been those in early Plymouth who did not drag their semi-starved bodies out into the stinking muck at low tide to grope for the same disgusting cold clams day after day and ankle deep in frigid mud that smells like nothing good on earth and shivering in that cold, wet Cape Cod fog that makes your bones ache raise their eyes to heaven and sing out ,"Thank you God, for these blessings." But some did, and that seems like something worth trying to understand.