colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thanksgiving was a day for worship, homecoming, and a grand meal. But the Pilgrims? Who were they? The harvest feast they shared with the Wampanoag Indians in 1621, an event universally known and beloved today, was lost to history for two centuries. It wasn’t until long-missing Pilgrim documents were discovered in the nineteenth century that the story of their feast at Plymouth was brought to light.
Those are two roots of our Thanksgiving Day: the religious custom of marking days of thanksgiving, and the Pilgrims’ feast with the Wampanoag in 1621. There is also a third root: a now mostly forgotten winter holiday that is celebrated in Plymouth on the anniversary of the day the Pilgrims landed there in 1620. For a glimpse of this holiday, find your way to Plymouth on December 21—but don’t plan to sleep late the next morning. Anyone not awake before first light on December 22 can expect to be catapulted from bed at dawn by three blasts of a cannon. Happy Forefathers Day!
If you haven’t heard of Forefathers Day, you are not alone. Today it is mostly unknown outside Plymouth, where it is still celebrated with gusto by a small group of enthusiasts at two venerable local organizations. One is the Old Colony Club, whose founders created Forefathers Day in 1769. The other is the Pilgrim Society, which was founded in 1819 to memorialize the Pilgrims.
Long before most of their fellow Plymouth residents are awake on Forefathers Day, members of the Old Colony Club begin celebrating the day. They gather before dawn for an early-morning march to the top of Cole’s Hill, where, as the sun comes up, they have an uninterrupted view of Plymouth Harbor and the replica of the Mayflower that lies at anchor there. Standing near a statue of the Wampanoag chieftain Massasoit, club members conduct a ceremony of remembrance, after which they fire off a salute on the club’s cannon. The Pilgrim Society’s celebrations include a festive dinner at which a noteworthy figure delivers an oration on the Pilgrims. These features of the Forefathers Day celebrations—parade, service of remembrance, cannon volley, banquet, oration—have changed very little since they first took shape in the eighteenth century.
In the history of Thanksgiving, Forefathers Day looms large for one important reason: It gave us the Pilgrims—both their designation as “Pilgrims” and a recognition of their importance in American history.
Before the first Forefathers Day was celebrated in 1769, the Pilgrims had fallen into obscurity. Their deeds were receding from memory, overtaken by those of the more successful and better-known Massachusetts Bay Colony, into which Plymouth had been absorbed in 1692. When they were spoken of, the men and women who had arrived on the Mayflower were called “First Comers” or “Old Comers” or “First Planters.” The name “Pilgrims” didn’t come into use until the 1790s, after a preacher employed it in a Forefathers Day sermon, and a poet used it in a Forefathers Day ode. The word itself, however, was first applied to the Plymouth settlers by William Bradford, the longtime governor of the colony. In his description of the settlers’ tearful farewell as they departed Holland, he wrote: “They knew they were pilgrims and . . . lift[ed] up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.”1
Like Thanksgiving, Forefathers Day is a homegrown holiday. It was created in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, when Americans were seeking heroes and inspirational stories rooted in their own continent and their own New World experiences. For this, they turned to the original settlers of New England, the men and women who had sailed on the Mayflower.
As the thirteen colonies trod the path to rebellion, war, and independence, Americans began to see themselves in the Pilgrims. Like the eighteenth-century American revolutionaries, the Pilgrims sought freedom from the tyranny of the English Crown. A century and a half after the Mayflower had delivered the Pilgrims to the New World, the heirs of the Pilgrims were prepared to go to war to finish the job their forefathers had begun. They would liberate themselves for good from English oppression.
By the Julian calendar in use at the time in England and its colonies, the small band of Pilgrims from the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth on Monday, December 11, 1620. There is an arcane debate about whether that date corresponds to December 21 or December 22 on the Gregorian calendar we use today, and Plymoutheans politely agree to disagree. That’s why the Pilgrim Society holds its Forefathers Day dinner on December 21, while the Old Colony Club marks the day on December 22.
The Pilgrims’ arrival in Plymouth is often called “the Landing,” usually spelled with that grandiose capital letter. Legend has it that the Pilgrims stepped onto the terra firma of the New World by way of a massive boulder on the shoreline. This is the Plymouth Rock that has gained iconic status in American culture. There is, however, no historical evidence to confirm its role in Plymouth’s history. Bradford doesn’t mention the rock in his monumental history of the founding and early years of the colony, Of Plymouth Plantation. Nor does it put in an appearance in the extant letters from the period. Rather, the legend of the rock came to light in 1741 when an elderly townsman by the name of Thomas Faunce, upset that a wharf was going to be built over the boulder, claimed that it had been the stepping stone of the first Pilgrims as they came ashore.
Faunce was not a reliable witness. For one thing, he was ninety-four years old at the time he recounted the story of the rock. No matter how sound his elderly mind may have been or how prodigious his memory, he was relating a story he had heard as a child, three-quarters of a century earlier. Moreover, the story came to him at third hand. He said he had heard about the boulder from his father, who arrived in Plymouth in 1623, three years after the Pilgrims. The elder Faunce told his son that he had learned about the rock from residents who had been passengers on the Mayflower.
The logistics of the Landing also make the story of the rock unlikely. As the writer Bill Bryson has observed, “No prudent mariner would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder on a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned from nearby.”2
The story of Plymouth Rock is a myth, but the heroic Landing is not. The small band of Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth in December 1620 were part of an exploratory party from the Mayflower tasked with scouting out locations for a permanent settlement. The Mayflower had reached Cape Cod in mid-November and set anchor off the tip of the peninsula in the harbor of what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts. The English settlers knew that their survival in the New World would depend heavily on their ability to farm, and they quickly determined that the sandy soil of Cape Cod was unsuitable for that purpose. So the scouting party set off to seek a more propitious location. They hoped to settle on a site for their new home before the winter set in.
Eighteen men—Pilgrims and crew—set sail in a small boat called a shallop that had been carried in pieces aboard the Mayflower and then assembled at Cape Cod. The men on the shallop were looking for a protected harbor that one of the Mayflower’s pilots recalled from a fishing expedition he had made several years earlier. The pilot had only a vague recollection of the harbor’s location, but he thought he would be able to find it once they were in the area.
By then it was December, and the weather was unpredictable. Soon the shallop and its passengers were caught up in a violent storm—rain, snow, sleet, wind. The shallop’s mast snapped in three places and the rudder broke. The little party managed to get their boat ashore and take shelter on what they later discovered was a tiny island.
Mark Twain would later observe that “If you don’t like the weather in New England now, wait a few minutes.” So it was for the Pilgrims, who woke the next morning to a perfect day. Saturday dawned “fair” and “sunshining,” wrote Bradford, who was among the marooned men. The Pilgrims explored the island, dried their clothes, repaired the shallop, and, Bradford tells us, “gave God thanks for His
