11/28/2025
Thanksgiving & Black Friday Pie
🥧 A bittersweet holiday history from The Heirloom Gardener - John Forti🌾🎃
Common ground.
Literally the ground that fed them. Pawtuxet. Plimoth.
Herring. Manure. Ten thousand autumns turned to soil.
Three Sisters - corn, beans and squash twining.
A shared harvest from Wampanoag fields, and colonial kitchen gardens.
In 1621 a humbled Governor Bradford writes that only 50 survived to see the first harvest feast.
“God took our small number to the waters edge and determined half to be sufficient to do his work in the country”. They joined with 90 Wampanoag to ‘rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labors’.
Thankful for the land that binds. They offered up a mutual thanksgiving for the bounty of the land.
…but nobody likes to be bound.
Much of the cultural history that followed was foul, yet I still take heart in the example of the first cross cultural harvest celebration in Plymouth.
We can’t help but grow from our roots, and sometimes we find ourselves in a tangled thicket.
I am not the perpetrator, but I am the seed still seeking common ground.
If we choose to, we can learn from history.
Our landscape and natural resources are our shared cultural inheritance – our common wealth.
Yet history teaches that some things cannot justly be commodified. Air. Water. Seeds, People.
In 1863 we declared our first national Thanksgiving. It hearkened back Victorian style to a simpler harvest festival that they hoped could reunite a nation deeply divided by civil war.
At the time, our nation worried that we might not survive division, slavery, industrialization, and waves of displaced immigrants and refugees. Many wondered if our democracy would even survive to see the nation’s first centennial.
So, we pinned our hopes on a humble harvest table as a symbol for common ground.
We long to celebrate our history, yet find ourselves dismayed when it doesn’t meet our current social standards. Like most things in life, history isn’t all or nothing - black or white.
Unquestionably, the first harvest feast hosted an array of emotional complexities around the table.
Today, we gather around groaning tables and the blue screens of consumer culture selling struggle, strife, pharmaceuticals and plastic turkey decorations made in China.
This year, the calendar on my cell phone made no note of Thanksgiving, while ‘Black Friday’ was highlighted like a holiday. It makes me think about new generations of robber barons, sour politics, colonizing forces…and the future seems just as uncertain as it always has.
So, we keep the tradition of breaking bread with the stranger, or the relative we try to love despite outmoded and offensive ways.
We try to grow beyond the thicket and graft onto better root stock when we can.
We cut open another pumpkin and sort seeds to roast and seeds to plant.
We try to make sense of how things came to be, as we peel, chop and make dough. And we add ourselves to the countless generations that have pondered how to advance civilization over pumpkin pie.
My Irish grandmother used to say that she only wanted a wreath of bittersweet at her graveside ‘…because that’s life - bitter, and sweet’. Though she would always be quick to remind that we never forget the sweet’.
As bittersweet as life and history can be, I still hold Thanksgiving as a reminder to celebrate the sweet.
So please pass the pumpkin pie…
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The Heirloom Gardener - John Forti www.jforti.com
Pumpkin and bittersweet artist Carol Schiff
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