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Thanksgiving is a festival celebrated in the United States on the 4th Thursday in November.

The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in New England by the Pilgrims who had left Plymouth in England on September 6, 1620. Their first winter in the new world was a hard one. They arrived woefully unprepared for the difficulties that lay ahead of them and nearly half of them died.

The area had been largely cleared of its Indian population by a plague of smallpox and syphilis which was probably caused by a previous British expedition of 1614.

The pilgrims built their "Plymouth Plantation" near the ruins of an old Indian village and survived by eating corn from the abandoned cornfields. Their attempts to regenerate the crop failed.

If it wasn't for the assistance of some helpful Indians who taught them a few things about farming the rest of them would probably have died too.

Their luck changed in spring of 1621 when an American Indian walked into their plantation and greeted them in English. He was the first Indian that they met. It is unlikely that the Pilgrims would have been able to master the Indians language so it must have seemed to them to be a miracle that the first Indian they met spoke English. He returned a couple of days later with Tisquantum, who spoke the language even better.

Tisquantum or Squanto, as he is also known, had been taken away to Europe as a slave where he had many adventures before he made his way back to his home to find that plagues had wiped out his tribe.

With his help the Pilgrims learned to farm and cook their food. Thanks to this they had a bumper crop in 1621 and to celebrate they held a harvest festival in October which was a tradition that they brought from England. It was only much later that it was called a Thanksgiving. They invited Massasoit and some other leading Indians to join them, however they brought another 90 or so uninvited guests with them to the three days of celebration which made it a bigger interaction between pilgrim and Indian than had been intended.

Learn more about this author, Sean McGoldrick.
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