Until 5 years ago, I really felt no connection to America’s “founding”. Being adopted, I didn’t know where I came from. My history was a fabrication. A lie. So, finding my ancestors – specifically – was kinda something. Pilgrims. Literal fucking Pilgrims. My American genetic origin story. Explains my contrariness if nothing else.

I have always found the Pilgrims (not the Puritans, they followed later and while they share similarities, they aren’t interchangeable) to be an odd bunch. Cultish. Dogmatic. But weirdly anti authority. They fled England because they hated other people’s rules after all. That’s Protestantism at its core, in my experience.

Thanksgiving in the US is a wild holiday. It became an official one as a nationalist propaganda thing during the Civil War and then it eventually morphed into the commercial kick off to the xmas season at some point. It’s a holiday that’s mostly about food and shopping for the majority of its existence, stubbornly ignoring its sketchy origin.

The Pilgrims came pretty close to dying off during their first winter. If the Indigenous in the area hadn’t taken pity on them, they would have because they were not farmers. They weren’t foragers. They weren’t hunters. They weren’t sensible really or they wouldn’t have set off for the “new world” on the brink of winter. They were city folk in a wilderness they didn’t understand at all. Believing a magical god would protect and provide.

The first Thanksgivings (they were not annual really and as time went on, they were sometimes traps) were sort of thank yous with a sizable “whew, we have food for the winter” things. Sure, they were family oriented, but like everyone in the tiny beginnings of the colonies that became Massachusetts and Rhode Island was related, so how could they not be?

But, Thanksgiving as a Pilgrim legacy of goodwill and neighbourliness, which it wasn’t at all, should mostly be a reminder to white people that they aren’t native Americans. We came here and took land that belonged to other people (no, we did not really buy it – read a book) and then killed them when they got, correctly, upset about it.

In a country where the owner class grants so very few holidays, it’s easy to understand why people like Thanksgiving and cling to the happier aspects that evolved from the initial gathering, but it’s a day with a dark legacy. No amount of pumpkin pie or Black Friday deals is going to erase that.