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Foreword Thanksgiving in America Peter J. Gomes harvard university former president, the pilgrim society One of the most enduring and endearing of American images is the Thanksgiving holiday family dinner. The turkey, cranberry sauce, and the array of pies have attained nearly iconic status, and Norman Rockwell has provided a Saturday Evening Post fantasy of ordinary gratitude from which no one can escape and to which everyone aspires. Not for nothing is this the most heavily traveled day in the American calendar. Christmas has its struggles between its secular and religious meanings. Easter has retained much of its Christian overtones, and the Fourth of July survives as a holiday of summer that may or may not have something to do with the origins of the American Republic. But Thanksgiving has a unique claim on the American psyche. Part of the reason has to do with the fact that this holiday, above all others, is bound up with our sense of the mythic past. The Fourth of July is certainly American, and goes with the founding of the Republic and the Declaration of Independence. But Thanksgiving, as we always remind ourselves in New England, is older than the Republic. And while in America we cultivate the new and unprecedented, because by comparison to other cultures we have so little of it, we venerate the past. And it is not a small thing to claim a past that precedes the nation and which seems founded on such homely virtues as family, food, and friendship. Thanksgiving does not suggest conflict or conquest: there are no military or local patriotic issues to be addressed, and the religious element can be as modest as local custom and family tradition permit. Thus, Thanksgiving becomes the American holiday that embraces all that we value without stressing any of the things that make a public holiday problematic. Thanksgiving is a big deal in America because we Americans believe it to be our unique holiday, hardly found in this form anywhere else on earth. And wherever on earth Thanksgiving is celebrated, it is invariably x Foreword associated with America and its founding virtues and values. At the heart of the mythic enterprise, of course, are to be found the Pilgrim fathers and mothers of Plymouth who, despite various claims to the contrary, are regarded as the founders of the feast. Hardly a schoolroom in America can get through the month of November without some depiction of the Pilgrims and their Indian neighbors feasting and playing together in the New England autumn. Even the ubiquitous football games, professional and amateur, while significant, are secondary icons on a day when the urgencies of the moment require an obligatory act of piety toward the past. Growing up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, I became very aware at an early age of my hometown’s special claim on this holiday. But even in Plymouth not many people knew a great deal about the Pilgrims or Plimoth Plantation. Some may have heard of the good ship Mayflower, and families may even have visited the fabled Plymouth Rock and been terribly disappointed at its modest size. “Speak for yourself, John,” the famous line of Priscilla Mullins to John Alden, when he went to propose marriage to her in behalf of Captain Myles Standish, owes such currency as it enjoys to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s once very popular poem The Courtship of Miles Standish. There remains much to be known and learned about the Pilgrims of Plymouth, but what most people know is that “they” had something to do with the “First Thanksgiving.” And that is enough to earn the Pilgrims a permanent place in the American pantheon. What Longfellow and poets considerably less accomplished than he did for the Pilgrims in words, Currier and Ives did for the even more vital imagery of print and engraving and for the place of the Pilgrims’ great adventure , New England. “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother ’s house we go” suggests a rural New England landscape, fitted up for the feast of family and the occasion of Thanksgiving. And although Thanksgiving is celebrated in California, and Hawaii, and Arizona, the picture in people’s heads is of that idealized New England scene where the generations gather around the hearth, huddled against the snow outside and renewed by generational proximity within. Half a century ago, Thanksgiving in Plymouth, as in most of New England , meant family. Most people either hosted their family or went to the trouble of...

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