Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
TODAY is not a holiday here in the Philippines, but it is Thanksgiving Day in the US. I am rather selective about which parts of American culture I carry around with me, but Thanksgiving is one that I keep and cheerfully dust off and exercise at the appointed time.
The history of the holiday is not what most people think it is or what children are taught in our schools. It has traditionally been connected to a harvest feast in the Plymouth Colony in 1621, a story that in the past century or so, has been sanitized into ridiculous folklore. The Massachusetts Pilgrims themselves regarded a "day of solemn prayer," declared around the same time of the year in 1623, as being their true Thanksgiving. There were even earlier "thanksgiving" celebrations that could lay claim to being the first: one in 1619 by the English settlers in lower Virginia and another almost 50 years earlier in 1565 by Spanish settlers and native Seloy tribesmen in Florida.
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