The case against Turkey Day

When I was a kid, growing up in the less classy suburbs of Boston, my school decided to take us all on a field trip. We all got in the buses and headed down the highway toward the Cape. But we never got there. Instead we stopped at a tacky little tourist trap called Plymouth.

You might have heard of Plymouth, Massachusetts. It's the town where it's Thanksgiving all year round.

They bused us all there to look at Plymouth Rock. Have you ever seen Plymouth Rock? Well, I have. What's it like? Well, basically, it's a rock. It's a lump of granite shaped like a sack of potatoes ("buhdaydiz" in the local dialect) and roughly the size of a Volkswagen. It looks a lot like all the other rocks there on the beach, but this one is partly dug out of the sand so you can see it better, and it's got a sort of Greek pagoda thing built around it so you know which one it is. And just in case you miss the point, somebody chiseled the date 1620 on the thing.

This is the spot where the Pilgrims first landed in the New World. At least, they think so. No one can say for sure they got the right rock. The rocks all kind of look the same, and at the time, nobody bothered to take note of the particular rock. Actually, it's just a guess.

What else was there in Plymouth, Massachusetts? Well, there was a town hall, a church or two, a grocery store, a whole lot of sand and rocks without numbers on them, and a dinky museum with a Thanksgiving theme. This Plimoth Plantation thing hadn't been built yet, so I don't really know what I've missed there. But from what I gather, it's a just a bigger and better tourist trap.

There's an awful lot of hype about Turkey Day. TV specials, school plays, cutouts of turkeys, caramel corn, etc. Why, it's even a national holiday! All this hype makes the story about the Pilgrims and the Mayflower and Niles Truncheon or whatever his name was seem like a big deal. When I went to the execrable public schools of Massachusetts (I'm self educated, but that doesn't mean I didn't go to school) they said this was the start of America and freedom and all that. Nonsense. It was barely even the start of Thanksgiving. Nobody made a big deal about Turkey Day until many years after the event. More to the point, that landing in 1620 wasn't the start of anything.

I got out of the bus and looked around, and asked myself - if this was where it all started, why it still such a dreary little village in the middle of nowhere? The big attraction around here is Edaville Railroad, not this stupid rock. (Edaville Railroad is great, by the way. If you ever find yourself in the Plymouth area, go check it out. Your kids will love it. And skip the rock with the number on it.)

Well, as it turns out, that's not where anything started. The first settlers in the United States? Virginia, 1607. What about religious freedom? Shhh... we're not supposed to talk about that in the public schools! Aw, screw that. This isn't Social Studies class, this is the real world. Okay, religious freedom. Actually, the Pilgrims had already found religious freedom on Holland. They also found a lot of lowlife there. They didn't come to these shores in search of religious freedom. They came to get away from those damn Dutch.

Well, okay. But wasn't Plymouth the start of English colonization on the northern part of the United States at least? Depends on what you mean by start. It was the first. But it never amounted to anything. A few friendly Indians saved it from utter failure, and helped the colonizing effort rise to the level of mediocrity. It wasn't really the start of anything, because nothing came from it.

Some time later, the Massachusetts Bay colony started English civilization in what is now New England. Boston is the hub of the region. Everything sprang from Boston. Everything good, everything bad - everything. Plymouth eventually got taken over and merged into Massachusetts, almost as an afterthought.

The problem is the harbor. To establish a colony that can grow into a city, you need transportation. On the seacoast, that means you need a decent harbor. Plymouth harbor is a bunch of sand with big rocks in it and a little seawater on top. It's more of an inlet than a harbor. The Mayflower barely managed to get in there. Forget about any bigger boats. You can't even dredge the thing, because there's all these boulders stuck in the sand. Stupid glacial moraine.

There was a much better harbor just a little to the north - what is now Boston Harbor. There was another good one to the south, in Narraganset Bay. If the Pilgrims had bothered to look around a bit more, they couldeasily have found a much better spot. But they were tired and cold and hungry, and they just wanted to get out of that freakin' boat. It could have been worse. The first place they touched down was the tip of Cape Cod, what is now Provincetown. That place looked too godforsaken even for them. P-town is now a colony for gay artists, where they can go do all their gay things without anybody bothering them because who the hell else would want to go there? At least somebody found a use for it.

If it weren't for all the thanksgiving hype, America never would have heard of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Turkey Day put this hick town on the map, and it's a very small dot on the map at that.

So what's Turkey Day all about anyway? Three things: family, food and football. We don't need all that Pilgrim crap to have a Turkey Day. So why the hell put it in this miserable time of year? Of all the times to travel and visit relatives. Only Christmas is worse.

Let's just admit that Turkey Day really has absolutely nothing to do with the Pilgrims and move it to a more seasonable date. And by the way, there's no evidence that the baby Jesus was born in December.



Angelfire link (turn off Javascript to avoid popups)

Freenet: /SSK@jbf~W~x49RjZfyJwplqwurpNmg0PAgM/marlowe/20051126.html