Hey, all you Gratified Feasters!
Thanksgiving is here again—a fantastic day we all enjoy in the modern day. Filled with televised parades, traditional football games, and a dinner that’s so good, people fast all day to make sure they have enough room when they finally sit down to eat! But these traditions have been nearly 400 years in the making! Things were quite different back then. Check out some of the things that came before the first Thanksgiving feast. 
East! No—West!
Pilgrims first traveled east when they were leaving their home for religious freedom. Many traveled to Sweden in the first decade of the 17th Century. By the 1620’s, however, they were looking elsewhere to settle and decided on traversing the huge Atlantic Ocean.Good Eats
It’s no wonder that the Pilgrims feasted when they finally succeeded in yielding crops from the land as the Natives had taught them! After all, it had been a long trip to the New World with not much variety in their diet. They mostly ate a hard biscuit called hardtack, salt pork, dried meats (such as cow tongue), pickled food, and oatmeal. That’s about it.Pop? Corn?
Contrary to common belief, the Natives never did introduce the Pilgrims to popcorn. The Natives were responsible for showing the newcomers how to yield crops of corn, but not the popcorn variety. Not to mention, it wasn’t even known as corn when the Pilgrims first arrived. The word ‘corn’ refers to a particular region’s highest yielding crop. In England, ‘corn’ refers to barley. It took a while before we dubbed this cobbed vegetable corn.Enjoy the foods you’ve come to know and love when you sit down to the spread at your Thanksgiving table and ring in the holiday season like they have for hundreds of years! Happy Thanksgiving to all of our camp families out there and, as always, I am thankful for my readers!
- John