Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving.pdf

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Thanksgiving Story.pdf

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Thanksgiving - An Orthodox View.pdf

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Thanksgiving Proclamations - First & Washingtion Combined.pdf

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Thanksgiving Kosher, Is.pdf

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BULLETIN 241123.pdf

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Thanksgiving: a day of national acknowledgement of the sovereignty of God

It is the current line given out in the media that Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful for good deeds of people. Nu, is this true? Is this the history of our national holiday?

First, some history…

Massasoit and the Pilgrims

As to the bare facts of the matter, from his home village in Pokanoket, near present-day Bristol, Rhode Island, Massasoit held sway over a number of related tribes in southeastern New England. Some months after the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in 1620, the Indian leader appeared in the new colony and offered friendship. After some negotiations, the chief signed a peace treaty with the English, one vowing nonaggression and mutual defense in case either were attacked. It was a treaty and a friendship that Massasoit would keep for the next 40 years of his life.

Over the decades, the two groups exchanged amiable visits. When Massasoit took ill, Plymouth sent emissaries on the two-day trek through the forest to Pokanoket to help cure their ally. On several occasions, Massasoit or his fellow Wampanoags probably saved the colonists from slaughter by warning them of mischief brewing in warring tribes. When Roger Williams, a renegade religious thinker forced out of the rigid theocracy of the English towns, appeared cold and starving at Massasoit's door, the chief took the desperate man in and made him welcome.

Little is known personally of Massasoit except that he was physically vigorous and when treating with the whites "grave of countenance and spare of speech." Still, as might be expected, when in March of 1621 the great chief first appeared at the head of 60 warriors, face painted red and wearing a thick necklace of white beads, the sign of his authority, on a hill overlooking the hovels of tiny Plymouth, striking fear into the little band of Europeans huddled below, much more was going on than the beginning of friendship between a good-souled Anglophile holding out the olive branch and the English settlers eager to return the gesture to their new Indian brothers.