The lessons of the first Thanksgiving

The Pilgrims, you see, didn’t even know the joke was on them. The Indians, before too many moons had passed, sized up their strange English visitors who not only couldn’t farm but were useless as hunters, loggers, or cooks, as was evidenced by the fact their food had absolutely no taste.

In other words, the Pilgrims were a bunch of turkeys.

So, when the first Thanksgiving Day neared, it was decided the Indians would provide the meal and the Pilgrims could handle the table setting and supply several Weber grills for smoking the meat, which the Pilgrims hoped would be venison or buffalo, if it were tenderized properly and complemented with horseradish.

Each group began its preparations, marking off their calendars toward the first big holiday when they finally could take a day off from work.

The Pilgrims busied themselves unloading the picnic tables and benches from their ship and unpacking crates of bone china, each piece wrapped in old copies of The Times of London. Two of the Pilgrims who had gone to art school fashioned a cornucopia for the centerpiece, then went about gathering shiny gourds and miniature ears of colored corn, which the crows would eat long before the big day.

While all this was going on, the Indians went about their chores, chortling to each other as they dug yams and turnips, squash and onions – and planning a practical joke on their neighbors, whom they dubbed “numb as a pounded thumb” after witnessing the machinations of their log home building business.

The day arrived with light snow falling, just enough to whip up a bowl of snow ice cream to coat the pumpkin pies, and to chill the barrel of white wine leaning against the hemlock tree.

When the Indians saw the outfits the Pilgrims had chosen for the holiday meal, they could hardly contain themselves. And, once again, the phrase was passed like a pipe from one to the other: “What a bunch of turkeys.”

So it was natural on that first Thanksgiving Day, historians would conclude, that the feature of the feast would be turkey. Not ham, not pork roast, not T-bone steaks, not speckled trout, not stuffed goose, though, in hindsight, that might have been as appropriate.

Everyone mightily enjoyed the meal: the cornbread dressing, the cranberries, the petite peas, the crescent rolls. So much so that they proclaimed the holiday would be an annual event.

What started out to be a joke turned into something quite different. After all, the Pilgrims, who were not noted for their humor, just didn’t get it.

They never knew the Indians had just given them the bird.