How the traditional Thanksgiving feast has evolved over centuries

The history of Thanksgiving has been muddled, debunked, and rewritten throughout history, but here’s why we carve a turkey and mash some potatoes each year.

Every fourth Thursday of November, Americans gather around tables covered with turkey, potatoes, cranberries, stuffing, and more. Over the feast, they share what they’re most thankful for from the previous year. Some also celebrate the day by watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade or a football game or even by running a 5K race.

But that’s not how Thanksgiving has always been celebrated. The holiday and the traditions behind it have evolved—from a much-mythologized 1621 harvest feast shared by the pilgrims and the Wampanoag, to a post-Civil-War era patriotic and religious gathering, to the modern holiday focused on good food and spending time with family.

The real history of the first Thanksgiving

 Historians long considered the first Thanksgiving to have taken place in 1621, when the Mayflower pilgrims who founded the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts sat down for a three-day meal with the Wampanoag. However, the meal wasn’t the meaningful symbol of peace that it was later portrayed to be—rather, it was likely just a routine English harvest celebration.

In 1841, Boston publisher Alexander Young printed a book containing a letter by pilgrim Edward Winslow, which described the feast:

“[O]ur harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together … [There were] many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted.”

Winslow didn’t describe the feast as a “Thanksgiving,” which at the time was considered a period of prayerful fasting. But when Young published the letter, he dubbed the meal the “first Thanksgiving” in a footnote, and the name stuck.

But the reason for that first feast was not a happy one—and the relationship between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag was fraught. When the pilgrims first arrived in 1620, they were unprepared and had little food, so they robbed corn from Native Americans graves and storehouses.

In November 1621, the Wampanoag heard the pilgrims shooting off guns—which historians believe worried the Wampanoag that war was underway. King Massasoit sent 90 men to investigate, before realizing the pilgrims were mid-celebration. The Wampanoag then hunted deer meat and joined the festivities.

The newfound peace between the pilgrims and Wampanoag was driven largely by tribe and trade rivalries, according to Ann McMullen, curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, who says that the Wampanoag realized an alliance with the pilgrims “could fortify their strength.”

But food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson says that peace didn’t last long: By 1637, the detente between the pilgrims and Wampanoag had disintegrated and the pilgrims started a decades-long war with their Indigenous neighbors. Ultimately, the colonists massacred the local tribes, including the Wampanoag.