Thanksgiving sermon, 2005
Sermon delivered by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian in New Bedford, 20 November 2005.
Readings
-- from Mourt’s Relation, an early account of the settlement of Plymouth by English emigrants.
Modernized version: Copyright (c) 1997 by Caleb Johnson.
"Thursday, the 28th of December, so many as could went to work on the hill where we purposed to build our platform for our ordnance, and which doth command all the plain and the bay, and from whence we may see far into the sea, and might be easier impaled, having two rows of houses and a fair street. So in the afternoon we went to measure out the grounds, and first we took notice of how many families there were, willing all single men that had no wives to join with some family, as they thought fit, that so we might build fewer houses, which was done, and we reduced them to nineteen families. To greater families we allotted larger plots, to every person half a pole in breadth, and three in length, and so lots were cast where every man should lie, which was done, and staked out. We thought this proportion was large enough at the first for houses and gardens, to impale them round, considering the weakness of our people, many of them growing ill with cold, for our former discoveries in frost and storms, and the wading at Cape Cod had brought much weakness amongst us, which increased so every day more and more, and after was the cause of many of their deaths."
Sermon
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. The fourth of July runs a close second, Christmas is a distant third. I like Christmas, but it has become so overhyped, it’s not really a holiday any more; it’s an excuse to go shopping. I like the fourth of July a lot, what with cookouts and fireworks and with luck an outdoor concert. But Thanksgiving is my favorite, for two main reasons.
First of all, Thanksgiving means I get to eat all my favorite food. Apple pie. Turkey with cranberry sauce. Winter squash. Mashed potatoes with lots of butter. You can have your fancy haute cuisine, I prefer good old New England comfort food.
Secondly, I like what Thanksgiving stands for. The whole reason Thanksgiving exists as a holiday is so we can give thanks. What could be better than that? Because if we're going to give thanks, that means we have to think about what's good about life. I don't know about you, but I spend too much time thinking about what's wrong with my life. I can use a day that’s devoted to just thinking about what I'm thankful for.
When I start thinking about what I'm thankful for on Thanksgiving, I am always reminded by the stories of the early celebrations of thankfulness here in North America. And that reminds me of the story of how the little band of English settlers came to establish a small colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It's worth retelling what they went through that first winter when they arrived here in New England. And as I retell that story, Emma [Mitchell, Director of Religious Education at First Unitarian] is going to go through the congregation passing out small envelopes that contain five kernels of corn. Take one of those envelopes, take the kernels of corn out, hold on to it -- play with the kernels of corn if you'd like -- and pretty soon I'll get to the place in the story where I explain why we're giving you five kernels of corn.
The Pilgrims and the other English settlers who sailed on the little ship Mayflower left England on September 6, 1620, and came to anchor off Cape Cod on November 11. The climate in New England was somewhat colder then than it is now, and it is hard to imagine landing on the coast of Massachusetts with the thought of building houses in the short days and cold weather of mid-November. To make things worse, the settlers didn't find a suitable place for their colony right away. They needed a place where they could bring their ship close to shore, a place that had good fallow ground for planting their crops come spring, a place that was defensible in case there were any hostile natives living nearby. The settlers spent a month exploring Cape Cod Bay, and at last they decided they could wait no longer. They chose a place that they called Plymouth, and on Saturday, December 23, 1620, they started cutting down trees to make their houses. The next day, Sunday, they were alarmed by cried from some of the native peoples, and they feared an attack, but none came. On December 25th (remember that they did not celebrate Christmas), they worked hard on building, but that night a storm came in which prevented them from working for the next few days. At last, on Thursday, December 28th, they were able to start building again, and on that day they laid out the plan for their little town, as we heard in the reading this morning:
"So in the afternoon we went to measure out the grounds, and first we took notice of how many families there were, willing all single men that had no wives to join with some family, as they thought fit, that so we might build fewer houses, which was done, and we reduced them to nineteen families.... We thought this proportion was large enough at the first for houses and gardens, to impale them round, considering the weakness of our people, many of them growing ill with cold, for our former discoveries in frost and storms, and the wading at Cape Cod had brought much weakness amongst us, which increased so every day more and more, and after was the cause of many of their deaths."
That’s what they reported in the story of their arrival in New England, which was published in 1622. It sounds bleak. About a hundred settlers, many of them already sick, with their food running out, trying to build houses in the middle of winter.
It got worse. On January 14, one of their newly constructed houses caught fire, caused by a spark from the fire they had lit to stay warm, and as they told the story, "The house was as full of beds as they could lie one by another, and their muskets charged, but, blessed be God, there was no harm done." But even though no one was hurt, there was all that labor gone up in smoke and flames. They were worried by wolves, who came among them and chased down their dogs. They heard mountain lions roaring in the woods -- in those days, there were still mountain lions in southeastern Massachusetts. Cold rain and frost and snow and high winds kept them from working.
And they kept getting sick. The problem was, they really didn’t have a way to care for anyone who got sick. They didn’t have enough food, nor did they have warm comfortable houses, and they were all trying to do hard work outdoors in bad weather. Probably the biggest problem they faced was that they lacked enough food. Some of them came down with scurvy, a disease you get when you don't have enough fresh food with vitamin C in it. Many more of them were simply weakened by lack of food. Their provisions ran out, and they depended on hunting birds and game in order to have something to eat; but they did not get nearly enough food by hunting.
In the end, more than half of the Pilgrims died in that first year in Plymouth. In later years, the story got told that they had so little food that there were days when each person only had five kernels of corn to eat. Now you know part of the reason why you have those five kernels of corn. Imagine if that's all you had to eat for a entire day: just five kernels of corn. That's not enough food for anyone. No wonder so many of the Pilgrims died that first winter.
By the time spring came around, things started to get better for the Pilgrims. They had made friends with some of their native American neighbors, the Wampanoag Indians. The Indians came down to the sea near where the Pilgrims lived, in order to catch lobster, as they did every year in early spring. Then the shadfish starting running up the stream near where the Pilgrims lived, and the Indians shared some of their bread with the Pilgrims, so they began to have a little more food available to them. It turned out that Indians traditionally planted their corn quite near to Plymouth village, and they gave the Pilgrims some of their seed corn, and showed the Pilgrims how to plant it so it would thrive.
Little by little, the Pilgrims were able to get more food for themselves, or borrow food from the Indians. By that time, they had corn and pumpkins and squash and venison and wild duck and goose and baked beans and codfish and mussels and lobster and parsnips and carrots and cabbage and lots of other food. At last, by October they had enough food that they felt they should have a real celebration. Technically, this first celebration wasn't really a Thanksgiving, because they would have gone to church for a thanksgiving service; instead, it was more like a harvest celebration. In any case, when it was time for the celebration, some of the men went off hunting. They brought back wildfowl and deer, and the four women who were still alive did all the cooking. At the last minute, about ninety Indians, all men, showed up unannounced, and they were invited to stay for the celebration, too. At last the cooking was done. Everyone sat down to eat.
And the story goes that, in addition to all the wonderful food that had been cooked and served by those four women, each person at that meal also got five uncooked kernels of corn. The story goes that each person got those five kernels of corn as a reminder of how bad it had been that previous winter.
This is probably one of those stories that is not exactly true. I know we have a couple of proefessional historians in the congregation this morning. If you want to be historically accurate, it's highly unlikely that each person at that first harvest celebration, which we inaccurately think of as the first Thanksgiving, actually got served five kernels of corn. The story may not be historically accurate -- but there is a kernel of truth in it.
So it is that today we tell this story, whether or not it's historically accurate; because while it's not accurate, it's a true story. Some of us who think of this as a true story like to take five kernels of corn and put them at every place when we have our own Thanksgiving dinner. It may not be historically accurate, but having five kernels of corn at your place serves as a reminder of how much we have to be thankful for. For all the troubles in our lives, for all the troubles in the wider world, we can be thankful for friends and loved ones; we can be thankful for the blue sky above and the broad earth under our feet; we can be thankful for each breath we take; we can be thankful for whatever love we find in our lives.
That's why Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday: I like to be reminded of all the things for which I can be thankful.