On Thanksgiving, said Karl Jacoby in the Los Angeles Times, “we like to imagine that we are reenacting a scene that first took place in 1621.” But to be historically accurate, we would eat venison and corn in late September. That’s if we ate at all; “devout Pilgrims” usually gave thanks through worship and fasting. We could also commemorate the “Publique Thankesgiving” of 1676, when the Pilgrims celebrated the bloody defeat of their Indian dinner companions of 1621.
It would be “more appropriate” to nosh on “coq au vin and a nice Bordeaux” in June, said Kenneth Davis in The New York Times, when the first Europeans “seeking religious freedom” arrived—from France, 50 years before the “Mayflower Pilgrims.” The French Huguenots had their own thanksgiving in Florida in June 1564. Life was good—until the Spanish massacred them in 1565.
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