The late Art Buchwald wrote the following column to explain Thanksgiving to the French while he was a correspondent in France and it became an instant Thanksgiving tradition:
One of our most important holidays is Thanksgiving Day, known in France as le Jour de Merci Donnant.
Le Jour de Merci Donnant was first started by a group of Pilgrims (Pélerins) who fled from l’Angleterre before the McCarran Act to found a colony in the New World (le Nouveau Monde) where they could shoot Indians (les Peaux-Rouges) and eat turkey (dinde) to their hearts’ content.
They landed at a place called Plymouth (now a famous voiture Américaine) in a wooden sailing ship called the Mayflower (or Fleur de Mai) in 1620. But while the Pélerins were killing the dindes, the Peaux-Rouges were killing the Pelerins, and there were several hard winters ahead for both of them. The only way the Peaux-Rouges helped the Pelerins was when they taught them to grow corn (mais). The reason they did this was because they liked corn with their Pélerins.
In 1623, after another harsh year, the Pélerins’ crops were so good that they decided to have a celebration and give thanks because more mais was raised by the Pélerins than Pélerins were killed by Peaux-Rouges.
The rest is here.
Happy Thanksgiving, and I wish you and yours all the happiness of the holiday. And recall that it was when the failures of communal farming gave way to individual family farms in 1623 (three years after the original contract from the London Merchant Adventurers Company was issued) that the seeds of freedom were sewn in the New World. And they have blossomed for 386 years. And may they continue to bloom and grow here and in all nations forever.
Attmay,
Thank you for providing that knowledge!
Thank you, also, for your good wishes. I wish you and all my dear gentle readers every blessing of divine guidance and protection, progress, wisdom, knowledge, success, good fortune, health, love and prosperity now and always!
Cynthia
You’re welcome. Actually it’s new to me. I learned it from this article on American Thinker:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/the_pilgrims_famine_and_the_en.html
I haven’t read the ebook linked therein, but it’s on my increasingly long to-do list.
Thanks for posting the delightful Buchwald explanation of Thanksgiving to the “frogs”.
May you know the blessings you wished your readers. Please take care.
.-= No Sheeples Here´s last blog ..Reasons To Be Thankful? =-.