On This Day in History: December 18

The first national Thanksgiving

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The first national Thanksgiving in the U.S. was celebrated on December 18, 1777. Having just a week of drunken gluttony instead of a month would probably cut down on New Year’s weight-loss resolutions. Anyway, the history leading up to this date is so very fucked.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: December 18, 1777--

Celebrating the end of harvest wasn’t invented by Americans. Harvest festivals have been around forever. In China there is the mid-autumn Moon Festival. Mehregān began in ancient Persia and is still celebrated in early October each year. The Jewish Torah-commanded harvest festival is called Sukkot. And although Oktoberfest began to celebrate a royal wedding, it too transformed into an end-of-harvest party with enough beer to float the Bismarck. But American Thanksgiving didn’t start with a wedding, it began with genocide.

When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, they already had their Days of Thanksgiving brought over from England. But they weren’t thanking that first winter, because half of them fucking died. The local Native American tribe, the Wampanoags, took one look at these pasty people in the pointy hats and said wow are they fucking useless at not starving to death. So they fed them and taught them about corn and now we have high fructose corn syrup in everything. Anyway, it wasn’t altruism motivating the Wampanoags. Chief Ousamequin offered an alliance to give his people an advantage over a rival tribe, the Narragansetts. Continues below …

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In October of 1621, to celebrate not starving, the 53 Pilgrims and 90 Wampanoags had themselves a three-day party. This is commonly referred by Americans as the “first” Thanksgiving. Not long after, the Wampanoags came to realize that it might have been better to just let all the Pilgrims fucking die.

For the next half century, the alliance was sorely tested by colonial expansion and the fact that those filthy Europeans were bringing in nasty diseases that obliterated Native American populations. In the 1630s a Pequot man was blamed for killing a white man, and in retaliation the colonists murdered hundreds of Pequot. The governor of the Plymouth colony said Thanksgiving from then on was to celebrate their glorious victory massacre.

Such assholery eventually resulted in the First Indian War from 1675 to 1678, more commonly known as King Phillip’s War. “King Phillip” was actually the Wampanoag chief Metacomet who adopted the English name because his dad had been friendly with the Pilgrims. But after repeated violations by colonists of their peace agreement, Metacomet said fuck this alliance.

The Wampanoag retaliated with raids, and the colonists went super murderous mega-retaliation against several Native American tribes. Thousands died on both sides, but in the aftermath the balance of power shifted to the colonists and stayed there. A century later a group of Pilgrim descendants living in Plymouth wanted to write their ancestors into history as the “Fathers of America,” so they started spewing this bullshit story about Native Americans who were all reverent and welcoming and saying yeah go ahead and have all this land. And George Washington bought it and made Thanksgiving a national thing.

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