"Here ye! Here ye! Comes now the accused before the honorable Minister of Justice. All rise and bear witness to the proclamation of crimes on this day, the 28th of November, in the year of our Lord, 1621." An old dirty woman is dragged in chains to a long table just in front of a snarling mob of onlookers as the word "witch" can be heard whispered about. Her head droops heavily, somewhat dazed and confused from only having stale moldy bread and water the past few days. She mutters to herself incoherently as she imagines the horrible ways she could be put to death.

Oh... What’s that you’re saying?... No, you’re not reading the wrong article, what did you think, Thanksgiving Day started out with eating turkey until you explode and watching football on TV? I know you’re saying, "What’s Thanksgiving got to do with killing witches anyway?" Well, a lot more than you can imagine. It’s not just old men with beards wearing black hats with huge silver buckles on their shoes and the women wearing outfits from the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ reruns. Oh, the concept of ‘Thanksgiving’ is as old as religion itself, being basically nothing more than a prayer to any of the millions of gods man has been able to dream up. But to really understand the true beginnings of what we refer to as Thanksgiving Day, we must venture back to those dark days of the early American settlers.

I can hardly imagine the terrible lives these people lived back in the 1600s; no running water, no power, no internet, and not even movies! Wow, that really must have sucked. Not only that, they were a very superstitious bunch also, which is not too surprising. Look around today... I’m picking up the letter P ... hmmm... was it your mothers’ cousins’ aunt who recently passed or crossed over or some shit? Anyhow, enough of the psychic stuff, back to the wonderful history and excellent job historians do... Not! I hope you’re not surprised that history is just as much myth as it is fact, especially the further back you go. It was around 1620 when that famous ship the Mayflower, financed by London investors, took on a group of Puritans called the Separatists and other passengers to America. And can you believe our first myth in the story and we only just started? The Plymouth Rock incident never happened; it’s purely historical embellishment. No, there wasn’t this nice heroic little landing like all the paintings.

They were supposed to land in Virginia and settle land granted to them by their financiers, but instead created the Plymouth colony in the wrong place. It was around this time that the Mayflower Compact was forcibly concocted. Out of the 102 passengers, only the 41 adult males were made to sign. For the first three months, the colony lived on the Mayflower trying to survive the harsh winter but by January, half of them had died. You would have thought they would at least have waited for spring to make this voyage but of course these people weren’t exactly bright. By March, as the settlers continued constructing their houses, the first encounter with Indians (they’re not from India) occurred. A man of the Abenaki Saganore tribe named Samoset came into the village and said "welcome, Englishman.” He explained how he had learned English from a cod fishermen and on his next visit he would bring another tribesman who could speak better than him. Enter Squanto, from his adventures as a slave in Spain to escaping to London and back again.

Squanto becomes their interpreter, ambassador, hunter and without him, they would not have made it. Squanto had arranged a visit from the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, Massasoit, who were somewhat wary of the settlers. This is definitely where old-fashioned myth making comes in as later Christians change the story, refusing to have a pagan hero. It was traditional among the native tribes to have a great feast for three days in honor of the chief when he visits. But Massasoit noticed the settlers had only enough food for themselves, so he sent men out to hunt deer and fowl. Everyone who participated considered the event a celebration of the two peoples’ peace treaty together and nothing more. The word ‘Thanksgiving’ would have never been applied to this story if it weren’t for the fact that William Bradford’s memoirs, taken by British looters, weren’t rediscovered in 1854 - a time of religious fervor that many became enamored with the Plymouth colony.

So with a little back-writing of history to support your religious agenda, a simple harvest festival gets turned into a god-thanking event for later generations. If you’re curious why I haven’t said the word ‘Pilgrim,’ don’t be. Only Bradford called the settlers this because he considered them taking a pilgrimage to the new holy land. As far as the traditional foods we eat, the settlers only had one of them, if you could call it that, wild turkey. They definitely weren’t like the juicy domesticated turkeys we murder today; they were tougher and harder to catch. The first national day of Thanksgiving was proclaimed in October 1777. George Washington proclaimed one in October, 1789, but these were one time events and were basically pious rhetoric.

Our common understanding of this holiday comes from a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale, a magazine editor of Godey’s Lady book. After about a 40 year campaign of writing editorials and letters to governors and presidents, Hale’s obsession became a reality in 1863. President Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November as a national day of Thanksgiving as a morale booster to his union troops during the Civil War. Thanksgiving was proclaimed by every president ever since, the date stayed basically the same until Franklin Roosevelt moved it up a week earlier for a longer shopping season. It wasn’t until 1941 that Thanksgiving was finally sanctioned by Congress as a legal holiday as the fourth Thursday in November. Well, I hope you enjoyed this romp through history and by all means, have fun Nov. 28 slurping up that juicy dead turkey carcass. (Sorry, Vegans).