Thanksgiving shares conflicting origin stories

Thanksgiving is a holiday celebrating blessings while sharing a grand meal with friends or family. There are many different stories that are told about how the holiday originated.

The story that children in America are commonly told in school on the origins is that it dates back to 1620 when Pilgrims helped establish Massachusetts. The story states that Native Americans came to teach the Pilgrims about survival in the New World. According to the common lore, they then had a feast to celebrate, which is how we adapted the tradition of Thanksgiving.

But some believe Thanksgiving should no longer be celebrated because of another story. The idea states that in 1637, colonial soldiers, led by John Winthrop, declared a day to celebrate that they had just killed hundreds of members of the Pequot tribe. There are many different versions of this story, but the general idea is that colonials had an epic feast to celebrate a gruesome murder of Native Americans.

We may never definitively know the true origins of the popular American holiday, but there are some facts that are known. One detail that every origin story seems to include is the fact that the feast lasted three days. Another fact is that many of our traditional Thanksgiving dishes, including turkey, were never served at the first Thanksgiving. One final piece of information about the holiday is that Thanksgiving was declared a national holiday on Oct/ 3, 1863, by Abraham Lincoln.