Thanksgiving? Thank you, but no thank you
In earlier years, my reservations about Thanksgiving had largely to do with historical questions. Yankee Puritans were not the first to have a formal day of thanks. That honour, depending on one's point of view, goes either to the Virginians who held some sort of celebration in 1619, two years before the Yankee 'holiday', or to Coronado's Spaniards who in 1541 celebrated mass in Texas and feasted on buffalo meat.
There is more to this than historical quibbling. Yankee Puritans reinvented the American experience in the 19th century, leaving little room for Southerners or Catholics in their grimly nationalist conception. As a Catholic and part-Southerner, I am mildly offended by the dominance of the Unitarian, Leftist, anti-Catholic bias of the myths invented by the Harvard and Yale faculties and shoved down our little throats in school, when we were children. I wish Squanto had left the lunatics to starve.
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