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The very first givers of thanks, Miles Standish and the other Puritans reveling at a dinner we now call Thanksgiving, were not yet thankful for the bounty of America. After barely surviving a winter during which half their number died, they could not even begin to enjoy the riches of the land. Nor were they necessarily thanking God for providing them with the food they were feasting on. In this case, God was besides the point. The reason for the party was much more concrete. That ragtag group of exhausted men and women organized a feast to give thanks to the Wampanoag Indians, whose corn they stole in order to survive. And the Puritans had much more than corn to thank the Wampanoags for; not only didn't the Native Americans kill the intruders for their trespass, they even taught the helpless band of scavengers how to hunt, gather, grow, build and yes, to pop corn, in their new, untamed home.

The meal itself was, for relative wilderness in the 17th century, as luxe as they come. Steaming platters were piled high -- but not with the victuals that we 20th century-ers associate with Thanksgiving dinner. Absent were potatoes, both sweet and white, since neither were native to New England and had not yet been introduced. There might have been turkey, but even so there wouldn't have been any stuffing since turkey roasted on a spit (which is how the birds would have been cooked) could not hold a belly-full of bread and onions. There couldn't have been apple pie; apples were a European import brought several years later. And if the Puritans did eat pumpkin pie, it was probably crusted with a pastry made from bear fat.

The foods that the Puritans prepared for their Wampanoag guests were varied and plentiful, if not exactly what the glossy magazines and cookbooks have led us to imagine. While seafood and fish don't usually grace contemporary Thanksgiving tables (with the notable exception of the oyster, which frequently makes an appearance in stuffing), eels, cod, lobsters, oysters, and clams were all abundant at the original feast. Braces of game birds; ducks, pheasants, pigeons, and geese, were served. But, the centerpiece of the feast was not any kind of fowl at all. It was venison, a gift from the skilled Wampanoag hunters (the Puritans had yet to learn how to bag a deer of their own), served garnished with watercress, leeks, and wild plums. Alongside the popcorn, corn showed up boiled, parched, mixed into johnny cakes, and stewed with beans as succotash. Cranberry sauce, sweetened with maple sugar, was possibly spooned over the venison, and everyone drank gallons of homemade sweet wine and beer.

The feasting lasted for three days. It was a boisterous affair, a party raucous enough to steel the Puritans for the long, cheerless winter ahead -- during which, because of the restrictions imposed by their religion, they could not celebrate holidays like Christmas or Easter with anything but devout prayer. A non-religious harvest festival, on the other hand, was permitted, and so, such a party was held in autumn as a kind of last hurrah before the big freeze.

This tradition of a harvest festival continued well into the centuries following the Puritans, but it wasn't called Thanksgiving except in some parts of New England. That nomenclature was not officially designated until after the Civil War, when President Lincoln realized that what the country really needed to soothe the ills between the north and south was a good party. What could be a better antidote than creating a holiday that celebrated a whole, intact country and so fostered a national identity? Everyone, Southerner and Northerner alike, could identify with the fledgling beginnings of this nation. So Lincoln took the tradition of a harvest festival and gave it a nationalistic veneer. The "traditional" dishes adopted for the dinner consisted of what the nineteenth century Americans were eating and not necessarily what the Puritans ate. And, along with a few noxious additions (marshmallows and gelatinized canned cranberry sauce to name a couple) these foods have come to define the Thanksgiving meal.

Of course, since the Puritans' time the foods we Americans eat have changed, and the manner and reasons we give thanks have changed too. But one thing has remained consistent over these past three and half centuries: we all still love a good party. Celebrate what you will.