I Lived Like It Was the 1600s to Understand the Meaning of Thanksgiving
Growing up, my favorite holiday was Christmas. Then, when I got to be about ten years old, my parents revealed that Santa, and happiness more generally, was a cruel myth. Halloween reigned supreme from about the onset of double-digits to my mid-20s. Once I could no longer get away with trick-or-treating, I started marking my calendar in eager anticipation for when thinly applied face paint would act as an excuse to get fucked up on a random weekday. But by the time I started staring down the barrel of 30, what was once my least favorite holiday had become my favorite. Looking forward to eating as much food as physically possible — even if it’s alongside the same duplicitous family members who originally lied to my face about Santa — is one of the few things that makes my life on Earth seem bearable now that I’ve become too old to believe in magic, beg for free candy, or endure crippling hangovers at work.
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I’m apparently not alone. Millions of Americans travel across state lines in the lead-up to the third Thursday in November, and as the holiday season approached this year, I found myself questioning why. I wanted to believe it was for a reason more significant than pumpkin pie and parades, because the alternative — that oblivion-by-food is our only reprieve from endless suffering — was too dark to accept. Ultimately, I deigned to embark on a quest to see if I could make myself think of Thanksgiving as something deeply meaningful, or even profound. I understand, intellectually, that women had no autonomy over their bodies in the 1600s, and that sex was probably the only fun (some) people could have back then, but watching movies like The Witch (pronounced “the V-Vitch,” by the way) taught me to believe that life was unspeakably bleak. How did people even think procreation was ethically acceptable, never mind find a reason to party? And why are we still carrying on the tradition of ringing in the fall harvest with friends and family nearly 400 years later? I decided the best way to answer these questions was to inhabit the likeness, and hopefully the mindset, of someone who had actually been on the Mayflower.
I would call up a handful of historians to help me construct a plan about how to pull off this admittedly stupid stunt the weekend before Thanksgiving. They would tell me how to eat, what to wear, and what stuff I wasn’t allowed to do besides the obvious of not using electricity or plumbing. I ended up with an apartment misted in pee, a churning stomach, and hands covered in blood. I can’t say I was totally surprised.
Before all that happened, I needed the right clothes. That led me to contact Ian Lycett-King, a hobbyist in the United Kingdom, an educator and re-enactor who hand-makes replica 17th century costumes with his wife, Caroline, and apparently has no qualms about sending his life’s work to a literal stranger in another country after two emails. My public school education — the same one that skipped over the fact that our forebears were genocidal maniacs — led me to believe I was in for one of those cool hats with a buckle on it. But when the suitcase of what I would be wearing arrived, I pulled out what looked like an indistinguishable mass of cloth that the Lycett-Kings told me hadn’t been washed in five to ten years.
Although I wanted my experiment to be as historically accurate as possible, I made peace with my first deviation from those self-imposed rules when I decided to inhabit the body of a tiny gender-neutral Pilgrim. It would be almost half a millennium before Celine Dion would debut her clothing line “for little humans with freedom of mind,” but there was no way I would be wearing an extra-wide skirt that was thought to encourage child-bearing hips around (the non-colonial) Williamsburg. That meant I would be donning a shift and a doublet on top, breeches on the bottom, a lace bonnet on my head to make it classy, and two enormous shoes not assigned to a specific left or right foot.
After getting dressed for the day, I made a typical 17th century breakfast, which for Native Americans was something called nasaump. (The colonists ate stewed pumpkin — which they called “pompion” — at almost every meal, but the traveler who recorded the recipe also noted that it “provokes urine.” Given that I would be using a chamber pot I bought on Amazon for the weekend, I decided to go for the Wampanoag dish.) Plus, it seemed like a good idea to acknowledge the experiences of people who weren’t characters in The Crucible.
Anyway, nausamp is basically polenta made with blueberries. The fine folks who operate Plimoth Plantation, a historical museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, sent me some grits made with a reproduction 1636 grist mill so that it would be as historically accurate as possible. As I ate the strange, tasteless porridge, I began to sweat profusely, despite it being winter in New York. I felt like I was wearing the entire inventory of a Jo-Ann’s Fabrics, because I basically was.
I was not allowed any coffee along with my sad breakfast gruel. When I spoke to Elizabeth Pearce, a historian who hosts a walking tour called Drink & Learn in New Orleans, she told me that the Pilgrims begged the captain of the Mayflower for some beer barrels when they arrived in Plymouth. Back in England, rivers were where the contents of chamber pots and the runoff from slaughterhouses ended up, and people just kind of concluded that all water made them ill. According to the story Pearce related, the captain initially told them, “No, not even if you were my father and you were sick” — he had to get his crew all the way back across the Atlantic, after all. But I guess he relented, because literature suggests that even though the waters in New England ended up being potable, the new additions to early 17th century America were essentially drinking ale from morning to night. One of the first things they built was a brewery.
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Pearce had also said that, to approximate what life was like back then, I should mix equal parts O’Douls and Budweiser to make a low-ABV drink that I would consume as if it were water. But as it turns out, even when you’re half-drunk, it’s really hard to entertain yourself with the toys of the time. Of course I had the Geneva bible, because understanding theology was the reason that the Pilgrims even knew how to read in the first place. William Bradshaw, the elder of the Reform Church, also brought copies of The Prince by Machiavelli and Problems by Aristotle over with him on the Mayflower. All of this amounted to me playing a then-popular game called ball-and-cup for a few minutes, having the urge to Google a YouTube tutorial for how to actually get the ball in the cup, giving up after remembering that I couldn’t use the internet, and then being stuck with a tabloid-sized version of the New Testament.
After hours of only being able to reade the strange byble to pass the tyme, I started to go slowly crazy. It’s hard enough to parse Olde English while sober, never mind while only drinking ale. My comprehension was further crippled by the fact that I had to hold a tiny beeswax candle to see and was always on the verge of lighting myself on fire.
Sitting in dark silence for a whole second day would have been too much to bear. But luckily I had made other plans upstate. I was heading up to Dirty Dog Farm in Clinton Corners, New York, to help two guys who actually wear Carhartt overalls for their intended purpose harvest heritage turkeys for the season. Though there’s some contention about whether or not turkey was actually present at the first Thanksgiving, it was undeniably a staple of the Pilgrims’s diet. I wanted to kill one by hand, the way they would have done it back then, too.
