I am sure everybody has their Thanksgiving dinner recipes out. All the Thanksgiving traditions and the Thanksgiving dinners, but do you know the real story behind the first Thanksgiving dinner?
In 1621, after a very difficult year, the fifty three surviving members of the original 102 that landed on Plymouth Rock gathered together for a three day Thanksgiving celebration. Of the fifty three Pilgrims that survived, only five were women.
They landed in Plymouth Rock on December 11, 1620. They found themselves in a strange land in the middle of winter. This was not going to be easy.
In the first ten months they built seven dwellings, a meeting house, and three small storehouses for food. They had provisions with them when they arrived, but those went quickly in the very harsh winter. Sickness and death found its way in among them, and forty six Pilgrims died that first year. The winter was so harsh and food and warmth were getting so hard to find, that their food ration was five kernels of corn a day.
Why did these people go through all of this? Taking their families and leaving England to start a new life in a land that they did not know?
Think about that for a moment. Put yourself in their shoes. Their devotion to God and the freedom to worship Him as they see it in the bible, drove them from the land they were born. They left everything that was near and dear to them behind. Friends and those family members that did not go were probably never going to be seen again. They were giving up everything and for what?
I think if I were there, I would have told them to stay. Stay in England! This is where your roots are! So what if the government tells you how to worship, and where to worship, it