thanksgiving in Massachusetts

We had a traditional unconventional Thanksgiving this year, in Boston. Unconventional, in the sense that we flew up on Thanksgiving Day (hint: a good day to fly - don't fly the day before), and three of our children were having a family Thanksgiving with somebody else's families in three other states. The fourth had to work late, so the three of us ended up eating non-turkey dinners at a nice restaurant (Boston is full of them). The turkey had to wait until Sunday, so the good leftovers got eaten on Monday.

It was traditional only in the sense that we drove down to Plymouth, where it all began if you don't count earlier settlements like Saint Augustine. We saw the replica of the Mayflower. Your mind boggles at the thought of 102 passengers, including three pregnant women, crammed on board, setting sail for a trip to God Knows Where in a boat so small. We saw the Rock. You know it is the Rock because somebody has chiseled 1620 on top of it, and there is a nice plaque explaining the Rock's history in a way that makes you believe it really might be the first stepping stone into the New World.

So I'm looking at the Rock and thinking how cold and forbidding the New World looked to the pilgrims, who didn't have an Interstate Highway to take them to Philadelphia, except there was no Philadelphia there yet, either. My kids had an ancestor named Workinger in Philadelphia in 1750. The pilgrims, starting out with basically nothing and travelling on foot or by horseback, put in a lot of hard manual labor to make the colonies look the way they did by 1750.

The original Thanksgiving was to give thanks for surviving. It was not to usher in the beginning of the Christmas shopping season or to mark the end of hurricane season. Sometimes we need to get back to our roots and remember where we came from and how we got from there to here.