If you're like the 2011 me, you'll settle down for dinner Thursday with only vague notions about the historical backdrop of the holiday feast before you. Was there really a First Thanksgiving? Did the Pilgrims and Indians really get along? Did they really eat turkey?
This year, I'll know much more, because I just spent the weekend in Plymouth, Mass. The location, I learned years ago, is where the First Thanksgiving took place in 1621 (or did it?) with a meal shared between Pilgrims and Native Americans (or was it?). Every year, Plymouth plays host to big festivities on the weekend before Thanksgiving: a historical parade, an affordable and unassuming food festival with clam chowder and pumpkin desserts galore, and permanent historical attractions that befit the spot where the Pilgrims settled in 1620. As a frugal Thanksgiving destination, it is second only the Kugel family gathering held just outside Boston, which is 45 minutes to the north (but, alas, is not open to the public).
Borrowing a friend's car, I drove down to Plymouth on Saturday, in time for the parade. Having parked on a pretty suburban street a few blocks from downtown, I walked past pumpkins decaying on porches and a few trees still blazing with scarlet leaves. The event was as different from the more famous Macy's parade as its New England small town setting is from Manhattan's Sixth Avenue. Instead of towering Kermit, Pillsbury Doughboy and Hello Kitty balloons, there were turkey floats, marchers dressed as Pilgrims, Minutemen, pirates and other personages from American history, along with military-style bands.
The only thing verging on corporate sponsorship I could detect was a banner sign from Ocean Spray, which gets much of its cranberries from local farmers. "Ocean Spray is a berry proud sponsor of the American's Hometown Thanksgiving Parade," it read.
The mostly local parade-watchers stood, at most, three deep; children stood on the pavement in front, with their parents, not police barriers, in charge of reining them in. To get some good pictures, I settled in with the kids, positioning myself next to a little blond girl (maybe 3) who waved to every participant coming by as if she herself were on a float, and some older girls (maybe 11), one of whom asked, "Why do they do the same thing every year? It's starting to get boring."
Not so boring, really — Plymouth's claims to be "American's only historically accurate chronological parade," with marchers portraying Native Americans and colonists blasting musket guns and Redcoats and Civil War-era soldiers and — well, that's about as far as I got before I decided to wander around downtown.
Parades, of course, are free, and several local businesses had gotten into the spirit, providing free cider and coffee and sometimes even edible goodies to the crowd. I wandered into the Blue Blinds Bakery, normally closed on Saturdays, where mini-muffins, eggnog and coffee were available for the taking. I took.
About the time the parade hit the 19th century, I entered the Pilgrim Hall Museum. Entrance is $8, or $6 if you are a legitimate AAA member – or, theoretically, you've borrowed your dad's AAA card and are pretending to be him.
Through art, artifacts, documents, displays and a video, the museum goes to great lengths to separate the mythical figures the Pilgrims came to be and the actual group, who arrived on the Mayflower to create the first permanent European settlement in New England. They did not call themselves "pilgrims," although, intriguingly, the first baby born to Pilgrims in the New World was named Peregrine, which means wanderer or pilgrim; a cradle purported to be his is among the objects on display.
Among other things I had not known: though religious freedom was the primary goal of many of the Mayflower's passengers, they had rejected the liberal Netherlands, where they had first sought refuge, as their children became culturally and linguistically Dutch. (The horror!) And they arrived to find the area around Plymouth Harbor empty of the Wampanoag tribe who lived in the region because the village that had been there had been wiped out by diseases brought by earlier European arrivals.
On display in a temporary exhibit is the only first-hand account of what would become known as the First Thanksgiving (although neither the early settlers nor the Native Americans called it that): a 1621 letter from a settler, Edward Winslow, first published in a book the next year. The Pilgrims were joined by the Wampanoag Indians, with whom a peace accord had been negotiated. There was wild fowl, probably including turkey though it is not mentioned by name. The most notable meat, however, was from the five deer the Wampanoag had hunted for the feast. (If you've been considered the family kook for serving venison instead of turkey all these years, you are hereby vindicated.)
I headed down to the harbor, where I gazed for a few minutes at the actual Plymouth Rock, which settlers may or may not have stepped on as they arrived. (The story of the rock was first referenced by a Plymouth resident who did not arrive on the Mayflower but was contemporaries of some who did.) Then I wandered over to the New England Food Festival, held under a tent, which cost $12 to enter. Inside, there were healthy-size samples of foods from restaurants and specialty stores around the region. Clam chowder was ubiquitous, and there were artisan breads, stews and lots of pumpkin-themed desserts. I fell for the homemade oyster cracker in the Union Fish clam chowder, and hit the jackpot with Marshland's lobster bisque, landing a huge chunk of claw meat in my little cup. The food was plentiful, the lines were short, and I was soon stuffed.
For a grand total of $20 – not including the gas I used to drive down — I had seen a parade, learned plenty at a museum and gotten my fill at a food festival. Not bad.
Day 2 would not be so cheap – because I had some guests: Sofía and Gustavo Reynolds, 9 and 7, and their dad, my friend Seth Reynolds. Plymouth is an obvious children's destination, and I wanted to see how they would like Plimoth Plantation, the recreated English village and Wampanoag living area.
The original plan was to first stop by some cranberry bogs — though they are best to visit in October, during harvest season — but an "I'm hungry" from the back seat made brunch into a top priority. I gave the Reynoldses a few choices: the Blue Blinds Bakery for sandwiches, Wood's Seafood for very reasonably priced fish, or the Rye Tavern, a middle-of-the-woods restaurant that a few centuries ago served as a stagecoach stop. I had been concerned about the last option – it looked fancy and the online menu suspiciously does not list prices, but a call confirmed that brunch plates were $8 to $12. I told Seth it should be within our budget if the kids could split an entrée. We ordered eggs and French toast (and, in my case, fancy-sounding "dropped eggs on toast, pork belly, cider caramel, roasted tomato and spinach," only $11), and only water as beverages.
That worked out fine, until Gus went rogue, pulling a "Do you have lemonade?" We didn't have the heart to retract the order, so Sofía joined in, ordering one and then, later, a refill. (It worked out, though – the lemonade bill was only $4, including a refill on the house, and the total tab, before tip, was $40.)
Afterward, we did stop by the cranberry bogs, which dot the area, and then headed to Plimoth Plantation, where Sofia revealed an impressive knowledge of the Thanksgiving story, down to Samoset, the Wampanoag who greeted the settlers in English. (At least I was able to add that Squanto, the best English speaker among them, had learned the language in England after being taken to Europe as a slave, before managing to make his way back.)
Plimoth Plantation is not particularly cheap — $25.50 for adults, $15 for children – but we got 10 percent off for having a (this time legitimate) AAA card, belonging to the Reynolds family. But it's definitely worth it: the role players who populate the village of wood-slat houses covered with cattail roofs are amazingly skilled, answering both the children's questions (Sofía: "Do you like it here better than where you came from?") and our more fussy queries about how the pea harvest failed the first year (something I had read in the museum). When Seth asked one settler what she did for fun she furrowed her brow, claiming not to know what "fun" meant. She was not being coy: it turns out the word only gained its current meaning in the 18th century. Pretty impressive.
We knew what fun was, however, and had a lot of it inventing Web sites and apps that the Pilgrims would have benefited from. There was P-Date, for Pilgrims whose spouses had died (as many did in the first winter) and needed to attract new recruits from England. Rosetta Stone Wampanoag was Sofía's idea, and Gus came up with an app that simulates carving a piece of wood using finger swipes.
At the Plantation, the uneasy relationship between the Wampanoag and the settlers came through much more than in the traditional Thanksgiving story: one Wampanoag was sent to keep an eye on the settlers under what seemed a "friends close, enemies closer" arrangement. Though the two groups went on expeditions together, their much-celebrated peace treaty that lasted half a century was more of convenience than of friendship.
But even if relations between the Wampanoag and settlers who attended the "First Thanksgiving" were complex and perhaps couched hidden agendas, can you claim any better around your table this Thursday? As James Baker, a Plymouth historian, says in the Pilgrim Hall video, "If you're going to have symbolic ancestors, let's have these guys."
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