Why 400 years later, Thanksgiving is still important

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving. Across America, every November we celebrate Thanksgiving Day, a holiday that is especially relevant now. As we cook, gather with family, feast and give thanks, we are also painfully aware of the toll the COVID pandemic has taken, disruptive events around the globe and political divisions in our country.

In contrast to such threats, Thanksgiving is a story of overcoming hardships, reorienting our thoughts to what is good and, in gratitude, striving toward a hopeful future. Thanksgiving, the antidote to cynicism, is a balm for a hurting nation.

Our Thanksgiving holiday was born of hardships. President George Washington proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving in 1789 as a new nation, in debt following the Revolutionary War, faced the challenge of governing under a newly ratified Constitution.

President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 set aside a national day of thanksgiving to help heal the country's wounds following the Civil War. The bounties of prosperity, said Lincoln, "are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God."

As America was recovering from the Great Depression in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established Thanksgiving Day as a regularly occurring national holiday. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy reminded us that the Pilgrims had set aside a time of thanksgiving to give "reverent thanks for their safety, for the health of their children, for the fertility of their fields, for the love which bound them together, and for the faith which united them with their God."

Thanksgiving Day memorializes the Pilgrims' first harvest. As Christians, their habit was to express gratitude to God for everything. Seeking religious freedom, in 1620 the Pilgrims journeyed in the Mayflower across perilous North Atlantic conditions and arrived, ill-supplied with food or adequate shelter, to face a harsh New England winter during which half of them died.

The following spring, Squanto, of the Native American Patuxet tribe, taught them how to sow and fertilize native crops and helped them to form an alliance with the Wampanoag tribe. Plymouth Governor William Bradford's handwritten journal "Of Plimoth Plantation" documents that, from their 1621 harvest, "every family had their portion" of cod, bass and other fish, corn, venison, fowl, and even wild turkeys. Edward Winslow, writing in Mourt's Relation, records that, after the Pilgrims had gathered their harvest and were rejoicing, king Massasoit and some 90 Wampanoag came among them, and they feasted together for three days.

Two early thanksgivings in Florida are also remembered. In 1564 in what is now Jacksonville, René de Laudonniere led a group of French Huguenots in a thanksgiving service at Fort Caroline. In 1565 in St. Augustine, Father Francisco Lopez celebrated a Roman Catholic mass of thanksgiving.

Our holiday is an embellishment of the historical record, but it retains an honorable spirit. Thanksgiving is a universal idea that transcends geography, politics, skin color, religious affiliation, culture and cuisine. To embrace Thanksgiving is to boldly defy the temptation to discouragement. To be grateful is to envision the hope that denies illness, hatred or affliction the power to drag our lives down.

Thanksgiving brings together not only families but also communities and people of different ethnicities. As Jacksonville welcomes refugees from around the world who have come to America in search of freedom, we remember that our Pilgrim forebears also were refugees.

That is why last week our local society of Mayflower descendants invited to our quadricentennial Thanksgiving luncheon a refugee family who, under severe persecution, left their homeland in the Middle East and came to America in hope of freedom and opportunity. We welcome them into our Jacksonville community. Their journey, like that of the Pilgrims — is part of our ongoing American story — together sustaining the noble principles of ordered liberty and universal justice.

May peace shine across Jacksonville this Thanksgiving. William Bradford's words are still true, that "as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation."

William P. Cheshire, M.D., a 10th great-grandson of William Bradford, is governor of the Richard Warren Colony of Mayflower Descendants of Florida's First Coast. He lives in Ponte Vedra Beach and is a professor of neurology.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: William Cheshire: 400 years later, Thanksgiving is still important