For Thanksgiving my family will likely be having chicken wings, pumpkin pie, and plenty of cranberries. I am okay with a meal that isn’t quite authentically pilgrim. For those first arriving at Plymouth in 1621, we read of an abundance of lobsters, mussels, eels, and oysters. If we want to be truly authentic, we should be eating acorns, turnips, eel, mussels, corn porridge, and waterfowl… but can you imagine bringing that to the in-laws?[1] Even so, if we want to connect the authentic Pilgrim celebration to our traditional Thanksgiving day events, we need to know more than what they ate; we must welcome the question, to what or whom were the Pilgrims commemorating this day?

Who are these Pilgrims?

My favorite account of the Pilgrim thanksgiving celebration comes from the writings of Edward Winslow (1595–1655). Winslow was among the leadership on the Mayflower and later acted as a diplomat for Plymouth colony to England. His is also one of the only portraits we have of the Mayflower passengers. The pilgrims did not adorn the typically portrayed somber black garments fitted with shiny buckles, such was far more Victorian than Elizabethan. The attire of the pilgrims was likely more colorful than what represents them today.[2] 

Clothing and food aside, the pilgrims were protestant separatists. They sought to separate themselves from the religious yoke of their government, to practice their religion according to Scripture alone. The doctrinal make-up of the pilgrims is much the same as the Puritans. They were Calvinistic, Congregationalist, and desired to live holy lives…pure lives, according to the pure Word. As evidence to their desire for purity, they earned themselves the mocking name of “Puritans,” which is unfortunately associated with holiness by works rather than the true purity these religious folk found in grace alone. 

The pilgrims fled the shores of their homeland long before the civil war that put Oliver Cromwell, a fellow Puritan, in power as Lord Protector of England (Cromwell held power 1653–1658). In 1620, having been swindled out of their money time and again, Edward Winslow and William Bradford led a congregation of families onto the Mayflower (the total manifest included 102 passengers, though not all Separatists) and made their way to America. Lacking proper stores of food and water, among other items, the pilgrims landed in dire straits. They thought the American colony would be a lush garden climate likened to that of Italy or southern France, according to many other travelers and rumors from across the ocean, but they arrived to a place accustomed to chilling cold rain and snow.[3] Five of the passengers died either shortly before arrival or while the boat was anchored, forty-five died within the first bitter winter. But we need not detail all the adversity they faced leading to the day of Thanksgiving, but we realize that these men and women were absolutely willing to live and die for the principles they held regarding their God and their eternal hope in Him. This would be the basis for their celebration. They risked their lives and futures, their health and wealth, all for the conviction that they must worship God the way He desires to be worshiped according to Scripture. 

Examining Adversity 

By the time the Pilgrims sat down for their meal the following year, the number of survivors in the Plymouth plantation estimated between 40–51 persons. These men and women were up against all odds yet they trusted and tested the providence of God. Edward Winslow writes: 

If therefore God hath given thee a heart to undertake such courses, upon such grounds as bear thee out in all difficulties, viz., his glory as a principal, and all other outward good things but as accessories, which peradventure thou shalt enjoy, and it may be not: then thou wilt with true comfort and thankfulness receive the least of his mercies; whereas on the contrary, men deprive themselves of much happiness, being senseless of greater blessings, and through prejudice mother up the love and bounty of God, whose name be ever glorified in us, and by us, now and evermore. Amen.[4]

What Winslow expresses is important. He was examining his heart and the adversity he suffered; not simply examining it in complaint or victimhood, but assessing how God was using him and the path of his pilgrimage. Winslow sees that God gave him a heart specifically for these trials, and that God would be the principal glory in his life and perseverance through those trials. To not see God’s glory in the trial is to miss the opportunity of receiving real satisfaction and peace. As we read in Job 36:15, “He delivers the afflicted by their affliction and opens their ear by adversity.” Often it is by adversity that God reveals His glory through His people. Such was a doctrine of the Pilgrims, they held to suffering as a real and valuable spiritual discipline! If we face adversity, do we see it as God’s course for us? That He has given us a heart ready to be sustained by His good mercies?

These men, women, and children survived their voyage and they survived the first winter. Now as they came upon the harvest season, they had their ears opened to God’s redemption…and their ears were opened by the adversity they faced. They were receptive and responsive to how God was using them in the new country, and how God was mercifully caring for them even through the struggles. A word captivated them from Philippians 4:19 (KJV), “But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.”

The very root and cause of their feasting was to commemorate their ordeal and meditate upon the providence of God in the face of their continuing adversity. They had a devastating first year, but they rendered a particular day to worship and praise God for His mercy they determined to trust.[5] They set aside this day to acknowledge their regular practice of biblical meditation (a common and popularly published method of spiritual discipline for the Puritans). How does the Spirit of God desire for me to apply the truths of Scripture to my life and circumstance? How are the experiences in my recent days useful in helping me respond to God and give thanks to Him? What can I learn of God and His doctrines through my daily toil? 

The idea of this special day to contemplate the providence of God was not intended as an annual event. The idea of a state-sanctioned annual feast did not occur to these men and women, and would not occur for a couple hundred years. Truly, these Pilgrims did not desire to make a routine holiday, but to specifically render a single day to God—to acknowledge that they had learned to depend upon Him more, and that His glory was shown even through their adversity. This special day held a mark in their memory, but it was not to become a routine event without care or deep intimate meditation on the providence of God. Perhaps we can take a moment in our day to do likewise.

American Foundations

Discussing the pilgrims, it is impossible not to delve into their doctrines. These were men and women who laid the foundation for evangelicalism, who wrote some of our most memorable hymns, whose children memorized confessions and catechisms, and those who built the very pulpits of our Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches. A chief doctrine among the pilgrims, and Puritans at large, was the doctrine of God’s providence. This is the doctrine that God orchestrates all things for His glory, thereby caring for His people and using, assuredly, our sufferings to correct us or simply draw us to Himself by more profound and confounding means. Their proclivity for biblical meditation was a filter by which they drew out such doctrines and applied them to their personal and communal lives.

America was founded, minorities were befriended, communities were grounded on this principal: God works all things for His glory, thus we can only be truly satisfied when we surrender our whole lives to His will. It was by God’s providence, according to these first settlers, that they were capable of surviving and enduring the hardships of Plymouth, the first lasting homestead of our European ancestors. God gave the pilgrims “a heart to undertake such courses” and not only to survive, but also thrive in their accomplishments. 

Congregational churches, as those established by the pilgriming Puritans, were known and often mocked by more eccentric denominations for their regulative principles and their equitable church governance.[6] It was precisely this sense of order that kept the Pilgrims of New England in unity, one with another, outside of government or personality leadership. They were unto themselves a church, a self-sealed congregation. So it was not one pastor, president, or official who declared a feast to worship God and give thanks in the face of adversity. No, it was the whole community who, through sincere satisfaction in Christ among the fires of affliction, desired solidarity in a harvest feast for God’s provision. The congregationally appointed elders, Edward Winslow and William Bradford, led in commencement. We see in these principles the groundwork for American Republicanism. 

Echoing the call for meditation on God’s providence, Winslow and Bradford remarked that stumbling upon Native Americans while becoming lost, hunting in the woods, was indeed a providence of God. They discovered corn that sustained them through winter. Not so long after this harvesting happenstance, and following numerous negative altercations, Winslow befriended the native elder, Masasoyt, and a treaty was enacted between Masasoyt’s tribe and the Plymouth plantation. Up until that point the only encounters between the natives and the pilgrims had been for mischief, but here they discovered means for planting and harvesting.[7] And this, not only for food, but for evangelism. Masasoyt was sickly during this providential meeting, but Winslow met him in his tent and prayed over him; his health soon recovered, and thus the gospel took root among the natives.[8] Masasoyt’s healing garnered a lifetime dedication to honor their treaty and help the Plymouth plantation survive and thrive in their new home. Truly this was a work of God! The devotion to examining God’s providence led this group of pilgrims to see hope in the darkness and to see equality and mutual benefit among these men, pilgrims and natives alike. 

Not Misgivings, but Thanksgivings

The Pilgrim’s day of thanks to God was not primarily concerned with setting tables for Masasoyt, Squanto, other colonists, or even the food (though all certainly played important roles). We are often quick to contrive a self-centered day for merely enjoying all the things we have. The Pilgrims were operating in thanks for the food, but more so for God’s mercy in the satisfaction and sustenance they received over their year of affliction. We, today, are quick to find reason to grumble and complain. We wander like the Israelites, seeing vivid applications of God’s mercy and humbling works and yet pass on by without deeper meditation. Our minds may work, but our hearts are deaf. 

We must learn to set aside our misgivings, and be all the more eager to lift thanksgivings. In stunning contradiction, given all he had been through the past year, Winslow wrote to those in England concerning his new home; he felt they needed to work on this principle of thanksgiving:

Wherein to your great encouragement, you may behold the good providence of God working with you in our persecution from so many dangerous plots and treacheries, as have been intended against us; as also in giving his blessing so powerfully upon the weak means we had, enabling us with health and ability beyond expectations, in our greatest scarcities.[9]

Winslow and those early colonists felt blessed in their weaknesses, they saw their scarcities as opportunities to depend on God and rid themselves of distractions. What mattered most was the spiritual retreat of daily life, wherein they discovered not only their humility in dependence upon God, but the rich blessings of God’s compassion and grace throughout their sojourn. We easily escape from these doctrines and get caught up in the black suits with buckles (which likely never adorned our Pilgrims), the random backwater account of the Salem Witch Trials, the idea of holiness and monasticism… all of these are mere distractions from the real authentic faith of our forebears. Those pilgrims genuinely believed and practiced a life of satisfaction in Jesus Christ. We are quick to point out their flaws, but we must be quicker in pointing out the wisdom in the Pilgrim’s lively faith. 

Of his time in Boston, John Cotton (1585–1652), the famous minister and theologian, wrote that over the span of seven years he never saw a beggar, heard a curse word, or saw a drunk person, as such was the morality of the community.[10] Keep in mind that Cotton’s time in Boston was only a bit more than a decade after the Plymouth arrival. The mindset of the Puritans, and the Pilgrims alike, was not one of false piety, but of genuine desire to be satisfied in Jesus Christ, with genuine concern that others may discover such satisfaction…not in a single day of feasting, but in a lifetime of confounding thanksgiving.

There were many accounts of government officials commissioning Thanksgiving services after the real 1621 feast. The traditions, as usual, seemed to obscure and abscond with the truth and the meaning. In the same way that so many deep and foundational truths seem to become kitsch and meaningless, let us not forget the purpose of the first Pilgrim feast. A group of men, women, children, and Native Americans sat down together as an intentional testimony among them that God’s providence was good and perfect, that God was glorified in their affliction, and that the lives of those lost throughout the previous year were meaningful, as God’s compassion and mercy could be tasted in the hard labors of the new world harvest. 

How Do We Respond?

It is not the food on the table that brings us to celebrate (certainly not the eels and turnips!), but the providence of God that has brought us so far from our land of affliction to the fruitful hope of his eternal blessings. As Joseph wrote when he named his second son Ephraim, in the tongue of the Pilgrims, “God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction.” It is not necessarily escape that we seek in the sufferings of this life, but the fruitfulness and satisfaction that comes only by Jesus Christ, no matter the circumstance or emotional responses. We do not grieve like those who have no hope (1 Timothy 4:13)! We celebrate as pilgrims on this earth (Hebrews 11:13). The authentic celebration of the Pilgrims is not ours by tradition, but by response; that here today, we can look to the mercy of Jesus Christ, even in our adversity, and know that our Redeemer lives. 

[1] Robert Tracy McKenzie, The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2013), 133. See also Edward Winslow’s letter dated December 11, 1621.

[2] McKenzie, The First Thanksgiving, 131.

[3] McKenzie, The First Thanksgiving, 87.

[4] Edward Winslow, Good News from New England, or A True Relation of Things Very Remarkable at the Plantation of Plimoth in New England (London: Printed by J.D. for William Bladen and John Bellamie, 1624), 66.

[5] McKenzie, The First Thanksgiving, 145.

[6] A.W. McClure, John Cotton: Patriarch of New England, ed. Nate Pickowicz (Peterborough: H&E, 2019), 72. A caricature from the time period: “The watchword of the Congregationalists is, order! order!”

[7] Henry Martyn Dexter, ed., Mourt’s Relation, or Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth (Boston, MA: John Kimball Wiggin, 1865), 31.

[8] Dexter, Mourt’s Relation, 91.

[9] Winslow, Good News from New England, A2. See the Epistle Dedicatory.

[10] McClure, John Cotton, 107.