It’s been many a year — 387 of
them, to be exact — since Thanksgiving, as we North Americans know it,
was first celebrated by Plymouth Colony in what today is Plymouth, Massachusetts,
home to Plymouth Rock and all things Pilgrim-ish.
Those early English settlers with the
funny black conical hats who were fleeing religious persecution in England and,
later, Holland, were no doubt grateful for so much that first Thanksgiving
— first that they had even survived the journey and then managed to live
an entire year after their good ship Mayflower, which has been as mythologized
as the Pilgrims themselves, landed in 1620. Also, we can only suppose the depth
of their gratitude for having found the freedom and free land to live as they
wanted.
Today, this iconic horseshoe-shaped
peninsula surrounding Cape Cod Bay, along with the island sitting a few miles
south that holds Martha’s Vineyard, has become equally mythologized, partly for
reasons historical and patriotic and partly for its fame as a summer colony for
the elite, especially America’s.
Be they politicos, celebrities,
artistes or just plain rich, people like the Clintons, the Kennedys, Paul
McCartney, David Letterman and William Styron have also presumably found a
state of grace in the simple Atlantic-coast beauty and low-key lifestyle this
historic area engenders. They dock their fine sailboats, and buy up fine Cape
Cod or Victorian beauties or ornate red brick and white-colonnaded Colonial
Revivalist homes, and return year after year.
By my
Oxford Dictionary of Word
Histories
, the words “grace,” “grateful,”
“gratitude” and even “gratuity” all come from the same root, the Latin
gratus
meaning “pleasing” or “thankful.” “Thanks,” on the other
hand, comes from the Old English
thancas
,
the plural of
thanc
, which meant
“kindly thought or gratitude,” which is Germanic in origin and related to the
Dutch
dank
, the German Dank and,
surprisingly, the English
think
.
When I imagine those early settlers
in Plymouth and compare them to us today it strikes me that
gratus
is pretty much M. I. A. in contemporary life.
Other than the occasional “thank
goodness” moment when a guy running a red light whizzes past the front bumper
of your car, or a sigh of relief when your mammogram results come back
negative, or that more people weren’t hurt, or hurt more badly, in that La
Bocca explosion, most of us seldom enter a deep state of gratitude.
On the other hand, we seem to get
much more excited about something when it’s
gratis
, with all of our something-for-nothing bells on high alert
in delicious anticipation of getting that desired what-not for free.
Gratis
, by the way, is a contraction of the Latin
gratiis
, meaning “as a kindness,” from
gratia
meaning “grace” or “kindness,” echoed in the Spanish
gracias
, all of it flowing from the same wellspring of pleasing or
being pleased, receiving or bestowing kindness, thanking or being thanked.
It strikes me on this near eve of
Thanksgiving that, for the most part, considered states of grace and gratitude,
or
gratia
/
gratus
in general, have been relegated to moments of religious or
contemplative or meditative practice, for those who practice such states. And
when was the last time you considered a gratuity as an act of thankfulness
rather than an obligatory tip?
More, words and phrases like
“entitlement,” or “hard to please,” as in “gifts for that special someone who’s
hard to please,” or simply “overwhelmed,” as in too much, too many choices, too
many things come to mind for this generation, some 400 years and eons of
productivity on from the landing of the Mayflower.
Barry Schwartz permanently entered
our cultural lexicon a few years back with his book dissecting same,
The
Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less
. It
documents the 85 kinds of crackers, 285 different cookies, 95 variations of
snacks like chips and pretzels, 230 soup offerings and 175 different salad
dressings found in your basic local grocery (this wasn’t a big box store
— imagine what he would have found there!)
To try and picture what early North
American gratitude might have looked like pre-285 kinds of cookies, I’m looking
at Jennie Brownscombe’s oil painting of the early 1900s, "The First
Thanksgiving at Plymouth," an imagined and idealized representation that
has more to do with gratitude and cultural suppositions than the actual feast
or event itself.
Here, the first Thanksgiving meal is
served up in a pastoral field on a long narrow table covered in white linen
cloth and laden with all sorts of elegant crystal decanters and silverware
serving dishes. The whole scene looks a bit posh, like a contemporary Feast of
Fields.
Still, the meal is of minor
significance in the pastel-coloured scene of reverential gratitude and
well-dressed, well-groomed people, which one can only presume are supposed to
be Pilgrims, although they more resemble Victorians in their finery and
bearing.
Way at the far end, two chiefs and
one other aboriginal man sit impassively at the table, while a few of their
brethren look on. From their ambiguous positions at the table and in the
painting, we can only assume Ms. Brownscombe meant them to be “sort of” equal,
but of little significance in the entire scene and simply partaking in the
moment, much like many contemporary Thanksgiving dinner attendees.
I’m not a historian, but Jean Leone
Ferris’s painting "The First Thanksgiving, 1621” from the same period
shows what is in some ways a more authentic-looking scene, with a thick-planked
wooden table bearing a few simple dishes sitting between a sturdy log house and
a spent cooking fire. What looks like a bunch of vegetable peels or garbage is
strewn across the foreground, whether the remains of eating or meal preparation
is hard to say, but it along with the expectant look on the nearby dog lend an
air of reality.
No one is sitting at the table, and
no one is engaged in any state of reverential prayer, for all the focus is upon
what would have been called at the time of the painting a comely young Pilgrim
woman serving a platter of what? bread? vegetables? to several aboriginals
occupying a very prominent position on the ground. One young man is pondering
his choice from the heaping platter with what could only be called the pleased
and grateful smile of any happy dinner guest.
The atmosphere is festive and
pleasant, although spartan, and can only be interpreted as a celebration of
reciprocating generosity toward the First Nations people who had helped the
Pilgrims survive that harsh year in the first place. It makes for a simple but
heartfelt notion of Thanksgiving.
However you interpret this upcoming
Thanksgiving Day, be it with dogs on guard round a campfire and vegetable peels
strewn about on the ground or with white linen and crystal decanters of the
finest wine, I hope you make it your own and find a moment to be grateful for
whatever it is that pleases you.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning
freelance writer who will be gratefully spending this Thanksgiving at an old
friend’s birthday party. You can reach her, and her friend, at www.glendabartosh.ca.
