\u2026to you and to your families.<\/p>\n
Thanks be to God for sustaining and nourishing us.<\/p>\n
Here is a post a wrote a couple of years ago of why I am thankful to be able to be thankful.<\/p>\n
The article below shows that the first Thanksgiving was actually celebrated in St. Augustine, Florida on September 8, 1565. This was the first community act of religion in the first permanent European settlement in the land and it also included both Spanish and natives. This article originally appeared in my diocese magazine. I am just sparing you looking through the pdf file for it.<\/p>\n
When on September 8, 1565 Pedro Men\u00e9ndez de Avil\u00e9s and his 800 Spanish settlers founded the settlement of St. Augustine in La Florida, the landing party celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving, and, afterward, Men\u00e9ndez laid out a meal to which he invited as guests the native Seloy tribe who occupied the site.
\nThe celebrant of the Mass was St. Augustine\u2019s first pastor, Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales, and the feast day in the church calendar was that of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. What exactly the Seloy natives thought of those strange liturgical proceedings we do not know, except that, in his personal chronicle, Father Lopez wrote that \u201cthe Indians imitated all they saw done.\u201d<\/p>\n
What was the meal that followed? Again we do not know. But, from our knowledge of what the Spaniards had on board their five ships, we can surmise that it was cocido, a stew made from salted pork and garbanzo beans, laced with garlic seasoning, and accompanied by hard sea biscuits and red wine. If it happened that the Seloy contributed to the meal from their own food stores, fresh or smoked, then the menu could have included as well: turkey,venison, and gopher tortoise; seafood such as mullet, drum, and sea catfish; maize (corn),beans and squash.
\nWhat is important historically about that liturgy and meal was stated by me in a 1965 book entitled The Cross in the Sand: \u201cIt was the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent [European] settlement in the land.\u201d The keyword in that sentence was \u201cpermanent.\u201d Numerous thanksgivings for a safe voyage and landing had been made before in Florida, by such explorers as Juan Ponce de Le\u00f3n, in 1513 and 1521, P\u00e1nfilo de Narv\u00e1ez in 1528, Hernando de Soto in 1529, Father Luis C\u00e1ncer de Barbastro in 1549, and Trist\u00e1n de Luna in 1559. Indeed French Calvinists (Huguenots) who came to the St. Johns River with Jean Ribault in 1562 and Ren\u00e9 de Laudonni\u00e8re in 1564 similarly offered prayers of thanksgiving for their safe arrivals. But all of those ventures, Catholic and Calvinist, failed to put down permanent roots.<\/p>\n
St. Augustine\u2019s ceremonies were important historically in that they took place in what would develop into a permanently occupied European city, North America\u2019s first. They were important culturally as well in that the religious observance was accompanied by a communal meal, to which Spaniards and natives alike were invited. The thanksgiving at St. Augustine, celebrated 56 years before the Puritan-Pilgrim thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation (Massachusetts), did not, however, become the origin of a national annual tradition, as Plymouth would. The reason is that, as the maxim holds, it is the victors who write the histories.<\/p>\n
During the 18th and 19th centuries British forces won out over those of Spain and France for mastery over the continent. Thus, British observances, such as the annual reenactment of the Pilgrims\u2019 harvest festival in 1621, became a national practice and holiday in the new United States, and over time obliterated knowledge of the prior Spanish experiences in Florida, particularly at St. Augustine. Indeed, as the Pilgrims\u2019 legend grew, people of Anglo-American descent in New England came to believe that Plymouth was the first European settlement in the country and that no other Europeans were here before the arrival of the Mayflower\u2013 beliefs that are still widespread in that region.
\nIn recent years, Jamestown, Virginia has enjoyed some success in persuading its Anglo-American cousins in Plymouth that it was founded in 1607, thirteen years before the Pilgrims\u2019 arrival, and that there were regular ship schedules from England to Jamestown before the Mayflower\u2019s voyage of 1620. Furthermore, Berkeley Plantation near Charles City, Virginia, has convincingly demonstrated that it conducted a thanksgiving ceremony on December 4, 1619, nearly two years before the festival at Plymouth. Thought to have been on Berkeley\u2019s menu were oysters, shad, rockfish, and perch. Along the old Spanish borderlands provinces from Florida to California an occasional voice is heard asserting that this site or that was the first permanent Spanish settlement in the United States \u2013 a claim often made in Santa Fe, New Mexico which was founded in 1610 \u2013 or that it was the place where the first thanksgiving took place. An example of the latter claim appeared last year in the New York Times, which, while recounting the colonizing expedition of Juan de O\u00f1ate from Mexico City into what became New Mexico, stated that celebrations of O\u00f1ate\u2019s party in 1598 \u201care considered [the Times did not say by whom] the United States\u2019 first Thanksgiving.\u201d<\/p>\n
The historical fact remains that St. Augustine\u2019s thanksgiving not only came earlier; it was the first to take place in a permanent settlement. The Ancient City deserves national notice for that distinction.<\/p>\n
Perhaps most of New England is now willing to concede as much, though that was not the case in November 1985, when an Associated Press reporter built a short Thanksgiving Day story around my aforesaid sentence of 20 years before in The Cross in the Sand. When his story appeared in Boston and other papers, New England went into shock. WBZ-TV in Boston interviewed me live by satellite for its 6:00 p.m. regional news program.<\/p>\n
The newsman told me that all of Massachusetts was \u201cfreaked out,\u201d and that, as he spoke, \u201cthe Selectmen of Plymouth are holding an emergency meeting to contend with this new information that there were Spaniards in Florida before there were Englishmen in Massachusetts.\u201d<\/p>\n
I replied, \u201cFine. And you can tell them for me that, by the time the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal.\u201d<\/p>\n
The somewhat rattled chairman of the Selectmen was quoted as saying: \u201cI hate to take the wind out of the professor\u2019s sails, but there were no turkeys running around in Florida in the 1500s. But there may be a few loose ones down there now at the University of Florida.\u201d So there! Within a few days of the tempest a reporter from the Boston Globe called to tell me that throughout Massachusetts I had become known as \u201cThe Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving.\u201d Well, let\u2019s hope that everyone up north has settled down now. And let\u2019s enjoy all our Thanksgivings whenever and wherever they first began.
\nDr. Michael V. Gannon is a Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Florida. He has had a long interest in the early Spanish missions of Florida about which he has written extensively. Two of his books, Rebel Bishop (1964) and The Cross in the Sand (1965) treat of the early history of this state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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