Thanksgiving – The Legend, The Truth, & How To Write About It

Enjoy this post on Thanksgiving – the legend and the truth and how writers write about it.

While feasting and celebrating is a feature of every country, American Thanksgiving is different. The very first one, so the legend goes, was in 1621. Today that legend continues, and the feast is, supposedly, rich in symbolism. In truth, all that really happens now is that Americans celebrate the good things that happened in their lives in the past year with a turkey dinner, and perhaps a junior school play about the arrival of 1620 pilgrims.

Thanksgiving – The Legend, The Truth, & How To Write About It

So, what does this blog, which is supposed to be about writing, storytelling, and developing your skills as a writer, have to do with modern American Thanksgiving?

Research. This blog is about research.

While I do love a good Christmas movie in December – The Christmas Story, and its sequel come to mind – I’m not a holiday-themed book reader. If the book is good, I’ll read it at any time of the year. But there are many readers who love holiday-themed stories. And Thanksgiving is one of those holidays.

The traditional story is that the European colonialists landed near Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620 and were met by the friendly Wampanoag tribe. Three days of feasting and celebration ensued. It’s a moment frozen in time of peace and generosity among the settlers and the Wampanoag. Of brave Christian settlers surviving the dangers of the New World with the help of some friendly Native Americans.

This is problematic. For a number of reasons:

1. The meal consisted of deer, seafood, and pumpkin. There were no potatoes or turkeys involved.
2. The first Thanksgiving celebration between European settlers and Native American occurred in Florida in 1565, almost sixty years before the Mayflower hove into sight across the Atlantic Ocean. Eight hundred Spanish settlers shared a celebratory meal with the local Timucuan tribe.
3. Harvest ceremonies, festivals, daily and seasonal thanksgiving traditions had been practised by the Wampanoag long before the 1620 settlers arrived in what is now Massachusetts.
4. The Wampanoag, as well as other nearby Native nations had been interacting with European explorers, traders, and slavers for nearly one hundred years before the arrival of the Mayflower.
5. The Wampanoag taught the settlers to plant crops and how to survive, despite that, the settlers robbed Wampanoag graves and stole food from them.
6. Both sides disagreed with the others’ lifestyle which created tensions among them.
7. The settlers took the peace treaty made with the Wampanoag to mean the complete surrender of the Native Americans, and that it applied to all the tribes in the area. This has led to the ‘divine mandate’ concept that Europeans had the right to take whatever they wanted, and the native Americans were the ‘bad guys’ for trying to protect their land and customs.
8. The tenuous peace between the settlers and the Native Americans lasted fifty-five years. Following that was a nearly three-year war. By the end of it the Wampanoags and their Narragansett allies were almost wiped out. A sign of things to come.
9. In 1789, George Washington called for a day of thanksgiving to celebrate the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution.
10. Thomas Jefferson refused to declare days of thanksgiving and fasting as he was a firm believer in the separation of church and state. He believed that Thanksgiving would be state-sponsored religious worship.
11. After years of lobbying by abolitionist, Sarah Josepha Hale, Abraham Lincoln called for a day of thanksgiving to be celebrated on the final Thursday in November.
12. While some Native Americans do celebrate Thanksgiving it’s not for the same reason as other Americans. To them, it is a continuation of their culture which was already in practice long before 1620. Other Native Americans have, since 1970, gathered on Cole’s Hill, Plymouth, on the same day as Thanksgiving to commemorate a National Day Of Mourning for the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their land, and the ongoing assault on their culture.

6 Reasons Why Knowing The Facts Matters

Fiction is fiction. You can basically write whatever you want. However, if you are writing about a specific event in history, like Thanksgiving, it’s usually good practice to do the research and make sure you have the correct facts. Why? Because:

1. It can give you different insights and perspectives to the event.
2. It can open up different points of view of all the characters present at the event.
3. It can help you create more fully rounded characters.
4. It can inform your plot, and your ending – you may start out wanting to write about the feast but realise that the story of Thomas Jefferson refusing to make Thanksgiving a national holiday is far more interesting.
5. It can make the book far richer, and definitely more interesting.
6. It will make you a better writer.

And more importantly, it can make your book stand out among the rest.

The Last Word

If you would like to learn how to use the three-act structure to write a fictional book about a historical event, sign up for a course with Writers Write It’s the perfect place to learn.

by Elaine Dodge. Elaine is the author of The Harcourts of Canada series and The Device Hunter. Elaine trained as a graphic designer, then worked in design, advertising, and broadcast television. She now creates content, mostly in written form, for clients across the globe, but would much rather be drafting her books and short stories.

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