No turkey?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is a holiday that many students of Patrick M. Villano School celebrate. Some people spend time with family and friends while sharing a large meal either at lunch or dinner time. Students learn in school that English colonists later called Pilgrims shared a big meal with the Wampanoag people, a Native American tribe. This feast is known as Thanksgiving, but why was there a large dinner in the first place?

“It is believed that there was a feast because they [the colonists] were thankful for a good harvest season, so they had a lot of  crops that grew healthy and strong and the years prior to that were not very strong,” Joe Martinez, the sixth-grade Social Studies teacher, explained. “They were showing their thanks by having that feast.”

Thanksgiving is always the fourth Thursday of November. It was originally to be a meal shared between the colonists, but a misunderstanding brought the Wampanoag people to the table.

“When the Pilgrims were celebrating they fired their guns to celebrate, and the natives heard the gunshots,” Martinez said. “The story is that they went to the people who were firing their guns because they thought it was a fight, but it wasn’t. When they went to the English settlement and they saw the Pilgrims there, they were just celebrating, so they all came together and had a feast.”

Many people eat different foods on Thanksgiving, including turkey. However, the Britannica online encyclopedia states, “For meat, the Wampanoag brought deer, and the Pilgrims provided wild ‘fowl.’ Strictly speaking, that ‘fowl’ could have been turkeys, but historians think it was probably ducks or geese. By the turn of the 19th century, however, turkey had become a popular dish to serve at unofficial Thanksgiving celebrations.”