setting the record straight
November 30, 2002
now that our turkey day hangovers are behind us, let it be noted that for all these years, we've actually been celebrating the wrong day.
it turns out that Thanksgiving originated not with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, but with an earlier band of English colonists who settled at Berkeley Hundred in Virginia.
the date: Dec. 4, 1619.
conspiracy-minded Southerners have suggested that our current national holiday is a case study in Yankee revisionist history. me, i'm not quite that paranoid (after all, historians are also pretty sure that Jesus was born in August). and Latinos are now lobbying for recognition of what they claim was the first Thanksgiving in St. Augustine, Fla., almost a century before that.
I had heard the Virginia Thanksgiving story before, but had no idea where the actual site was located. so it struck me as a really weird coincidence last Thursday when Jennifer and I, as we were enjoying a leisurely post-turkey dinner drive through the Virginia countryside, happened to stumble - completely unexpectedly - on the site of the original Thanksgiving.
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