In One Ear: A moveable feast

Published 12:15 am Thursday, November 23, 2023

While the Pilgrims may have made a big deal about that first sit-down dinner with all the trimmings in 1621, with 90 Native American guests from a nearby village, including their leader, Massasoit, apparently nobody bothered to write down the actual date.

Naturally, though, it would have to have been sometime after the fall harvest.

The feast lasted for three days, anyway, as noted by William Bradford in “Of Plymouth Plantation,” and Edward Winslow in his journal, “Mourt’s Relations,” the only firsthand written accounts of the event.

The fare probably included fowl (nope, no turkey), venison, local fruits and vegetables, mussels and fish, but no potatoes (not growing there yet) or pumpkin pie (no butter or wheat flour, and no oven).

For more than 200 years, the date, or dates, for Thanksgiving events was a rather iffy affair, varying from colony to colony and state to state. It was President Abraham Lincoln, in 1863, who declared that the last Thursday in November would be the official date for a national Thanksgiving Day.

Finally, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed the date to the fourth Thursday in November in 1941. And, thankfully, it’s stayed that way ever since. (Painting: Jean Leon Gerome Ferris)