So was the Pilgrim Thanksgiving with the Wampanoag Indians in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621 the first American Thanksgiving or was it really in 1564, in present day Jacksonville, Florida where French Huguenots celebrated with the Timucua Indians?...........Does it really matter?...........More importantly, I was curious about what foodstuffs from forest, field, stream, and ocean were really consumed at both of these historical Thanksgivings?......."Deer, fowl(ducks or Wild Turkeys), onions, beans, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots and cornmeal, peas, gooseberries, raspberries, cranberries, mussels, lobster, clams, oysters, pumpkins and squash likely filled the New England version of Thanksgiving with items such as alligator, black bear and tortoise included in the Florida version".........."Modern Thanksgiving celebrations date back to around the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation setting a specific day for our national day of thanks" ........."Unlike the family day it is today, in the 1800's, folks of little means, especially the men, escaped from their families for a day of rule breaking and spontaneous mirth"......... "It wasn’t all fun and games, either: Drunken men and boys, often masked, paraded from house to house and demanded to be treated"........ “Boys misbehaved and men committed physical assaults on Thanksgiving as well as on Christmas"........... "From this culture of “misrule” came the 'Fantastics', a group of pranksters, often dressed as women, who would parade good naturedly through the streets"........... “The 'Fantastics' paraded in rural and urban areas of eastern and central Pennsylvania and New York City on Thanksgiving, New Year’s Eve and Day, Battalion Day, Washington’s Birthday and the fourth of July"....... "Unlike the loose groups of boys and men who middle and upper-class people had previously feared on Thanksgiving day, 'Fantastical' parades were regarded as good fun"..........."These parades were an American variation on an ancient European theme--the charivari, or the 'world-turned-upside-down celebration' which for many, was a way to thumb your nose at the propertied ane the elite".............I always am amazed at how so much American history is not revealed to us during our school years.............Fun to finally know the the true origens and goings-on of this unique and teriffic American holiday.........All of you relax, have your fill of food and drink, kick back and have a blast!

http://www.history.com/topics/thanksgiving/first-thanksgiving-meal

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-thanksgiving-parades-were-riots-180967256/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/pilgrims-werent-first-celebrate-thanksgiving-180967310/

http://www.history.com/news/did-florida-host-the-first-thanksgiving

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwivg5DzyNPXAhUhxoMKHbMKBLgQFggoMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fwp-srv%2FWPcap%2F1999-11%2F25%2F078r-112599-idx.html&usg=AOvVaw33aBJc2x8WIgsOh-GOWb0b

BET YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THANKSGIVING
by-The History Channel

For many Americans, the Thanksgiving meal includes seasonal dishes such as roast turkey with stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. The holiday feast dates back to November 1621, when the newly arrived Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians gathered at Plymouth for an autumn harvest celebration, an event regarded as America’s “first Thanksgiving.” But what was really on the menu at the famous banquet, and which of today’s time-honored favorites didn’t earn a place at the table until later in the holiday’s 400-year history?

TURKEY

While no records exist of the exact bill of fare, the Pilgrim chronicler Edward Winslow noted in his journal that the colony’s governor, William Bradford, sent four men on a “fowling” mission in preparation for the three-day event. Wild—but not domestic—turkey was indeed plentiful in the region and a common food source for both English settlers and Native Americans. But it is just as likely that the fowling party returned with other birds we know the colonists regularly consumed, such as ducks, geese and swans. Instead of bread-based stuffing, herbs, onions or nuts might have been added to the birds for extra flavor.

Turkey or no turkey, the first Thanksgiving’s attendees almost certainly got their fill of meat. Winslow wrote that the Wampanoag guests arrived with an offering of five deer. Culinary historians speculate that the deer was roasted on a spit over a smoldering fire and that the colonists might have used some of the venison to whip up a hearty stew.

Thanksgiving in the 19th century was less Norman Rockwell, more Mardi Gras. (By James E. Taylor [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

The 1621 Thanksgiving celebration marked the Pilgrims’ first autumn harvest, so it is likely that the colonists feasted on the bounty they had reaped with the help of their Native American neighbors. Local vegetables that likely appeared on the table include onions, beans, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots and perhaps peas. Corn, which records show was plentiful at the first harvest, might also have been served, but not in the way most people enjoy it now. In those days, the corn would have been removed from the cob and turned into cornmeal, which was then boiled and pounded into a thick corn mush or porridge that was occasionally sweetened with molasses.

children in costume for Thanksgiving sometime in the early 1910s (Bain News Service/Library of Congress)

gooseberries, raspberries and, of course cranberries, which Native Americans ate and used as a natural dye. The Pilgrims might have been familiar with cranberries by the first Thanksgiving, but they wouldn’t have made sauces and relishes with the tart orbs. That’s because the sacks of sugar that traveled across the Atlantic on the Mayflower were nearly or fully depleted by November 1621. Cooks didn’t begin boiling cranberries with sugar and using the mixture as an accompaniment for meats until about 50 years later.

St. Augustine, Florida. (Credit: RussDuparcq/iStockphoto.com)

FISH AND SHELLFISH

Culinary historians believe that much of the Thanksgiving meal consisted of seafood, which is often absent from today’s menus. Mussels in particular were abundant in New England and could be easily harvested because they clung to rocks along the shoreline. The colonists occasionally served mussels with curds, a dairy product with a similar consistency to cottage cheese. Lobster, bass, clams and oysters might also have been part of the feast.

POTATOES

Whether mashed or roasted, white or sweet, potatoes had no place at the first Thanksgiving. After encountering it in its native South America, the Spanish began introducing the potato to Europeans around 1570. But by the time the Pilgrims boarded the Mayflower, the tuber had neither doubled back to North America nor become popular enough with the English to hitch a ride. New England’s native inhabitants are known to have eaten other plant roots such as Indian turnips and groundnuts, which they may or may not have brought to the party.

PUMPKIN PIE

Both the Pilgrims and members of the Wampanoag tribe ate pumpkins and other squashes indigenous to New England—possibly even during the harvest festival—but the fledgling colony lacked the butter and wheat flour necessary for making pie crust. Moreover, settlers hadn’t yet constructed an oven for baking. According to some accounts, early English settlers in North America improvised by hollowing out pumpkins, filling the shells with milk, honey and spices to make a custard, then roasting the gourds whole in hot ashes.

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Let Us Give Pranks: The Holiday's Irreverent Past

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 25, 1999

Ah, the pleasures of the traditional Thanksgiving--the turkey, the cranberries, the cross-dressing, the begging, the disrupting of Broadway shows . . .

Wait a minute. Cross-dressing? Disrupting Broadway shows? When did these activities become part of the traditional Thanksgiving experience?

Shortly after the American Revolution, says Elizabeth Pleck, professor of history at the University of Illinois and author of the forthcoming book "Celebrating the Family," which traces the history of American holidays. "Rowdiness was a part of the celebration," says Pleck. "There was a lot of drunken male behavior related to holiday times. We're not used to thinking of that in association with Thanksgiving, which has been purged of that sort of thing."

Indeed, Thanksgiving is a sedate domestic holiday these days, a cozy celebration of family and food. In rural New England, where it originated three centuries ago, Thanksgiving was traditionally a quiet day--a morning church service followed by a family feast.

But there's another, more raucous Thanksgiving tradition. From the Revolution through the early days of this century, working-class men in New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere celebrated the holiday by parading through the streets, sometimes in blackface or in drag, sometimes clad in costumes that parodied prominent rich people. Which was, in fact, the same way they celebrated many other holidays, including Christmas and the Fourth of July.

"Getting up in women's clothing was a standard part of a lot of festive occasions," Pleck says. "They were making fun of gender conventions. It was part of saying, 'We're flouting all the conventions here. We're making fun of everything.' "

These parades were an American variation on an ancient European theme--the charivari, or the "world-turned-upside-down celebration," says Josh Brown, director of the American Social History Project at the City University of New York. "Doing that stuff on Thanksgiving," Brown says, "was to some extent thumbing your nose at the propertied."

In New York, the parades were known as "Fantastics" and they got quite elaborate. In the late 1800s, immigrant Irish Catholic policemen and politicians joined the fun. In those days, Catholics regarded the standard Thanksgiving as a Protestant holiday, Pleck says, so they felt free to celebrate their own way, which included the Fantastics.

"These were real processions, with some men on horseback and men in carts and men in drag," she says. "They would march through New York and they would end up in the park, where there would be a rowdy, drunken picnic."

Even then, traditional American family values prevailed, and these rowdy men were joined in their holiday bacchanal by their wives, who catered the drunken picnics, and by their children, who dressed in rags and masks and followed behind the Fantastics with their own "Ragamuffin Parade," blowing horns and begging coins from spectators.

"Once the parade ended, they'd go to the homes of the rich and go begging," Pleck says. "They'd do a performance of some kind and they'd expect to get food and coins. If they didn't, they'd respond with some sort of disorderly act--defacing property or overturning the outhouse."

The sons of the rich observed this revelry with a hint of envy. It seemed like a lot more fun than a morning church service followed by an afternoon of roast turkey with Mom and Dad and maiden Aunt Edna. So they created their own variety of Thanksgiving rowdiness. It began in the 1870s and revolved around college football.

In those days, the final game of the collegiate season was held on Thanksgiving and the Ivy League championship was played at the Polo Grounds in New York. Hordes of college lads descended on Manhattan to drink, cheer their teams on, and then celebrate (or drown their sorrows) by drinking some more. After that, they'd head for the Broadway shows, where they exhibited their lusty affection for the showgirls by throwing stuff at the stage.

"There would be a musical number and they'd start shouting and throwing things and breaking things," Pleck says, "and the managers of these theaters would call the police."

Ah, life sure was fun in those days!

But all good things come to an end. In the 1890s--a period of labor unrest and social upheaval--the middle class lost its tolerance for street rowdiness. Ministers denounced football as a desecration of the national feast day. In 1894 the Ivy League presidents, embarrassed at the behavior of their students, shifted the season-ending game to the Saturday before Thanksgiving and moved it back to campus.

Meanwhile, the New York Times was denouncing the Fantastics parade as a "public nuisance" and attacking the tradition of begging as a "malicious influence on the morals of children."

The killjoys carried the day. Gradually, the Fantastics died out and the begging metamorphosed into Halloween's far tamer custom of trick-or-treating. In 1924, Macy's created its own Thanksgiving Day parade but, of course, the emphasis was not on revelry and social mockery but on commercialism--kicking off the sacred holiday buying season.

"These days, people go to the Thanksgiving day parade to watch," says Brown. "In the 19th century, the notion of a parade was to participate."

Today, Thanksgiving has been thoroughly domesticated--in both senses of that word. It's a completely homebound family holiday--"a celebration," Pleck says, "of the ideal of the family, of family affection and nurturance and homecoming."

Which is a wonderful thing to celebrate, of course. But it doesn't leave much room for the traditional Thanksgiving pleasures--cross-dressing, begging and the disruption of Broadway shows.