Gobble, Gobble

It just dawned on Jen and I that this coming Thursday is Thanksgiving. Oof.

I won’t be out on the official Xmas shopping kick-off – “Black Friday.” Nope. Can’t deal with the crazed crowds Oh…wait. Black Market is happening over in Dudley Square!

BLACK MARKET is a retail pop-up market in Dudley Square established by local entrepreneurs for local entrepreneurs driven by the mission to revitalize Boston's Black Creative Economy.

Hand made goods!

Amongst all the vendors is clothing designer Stanley Rameau of I Am Kréyol. Christ on Chantilly lace with ruffles, I love his work!

You can find Black Market at 2136 Washington Street in Roxbury, Massachusetts .

What about the real, non-shopping, meaning and origins of turkey day? Ya know, the whole happy pilgrims and Indians getting together for a thanks-be-to-god din-din story. As with a lot of the supposed history we leaned in school, this one’s a goddamn myth.

For starters, those generic Indians you see in all the cute Thanksgiving clip art? They were Wampanoag. The name of their nation means People of the First Light. These were real people not stock characters out of central casting. 

Did you know? The day’s Celebration came into being after a massacre. No shockerooni, it was the Indians (Pequots) getting all massacred up.

The Governor of Plymouth William Bradford wrote: “Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire…horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.”

Gosh, how pleasant.

“For the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.” (source)

The Wampanoag and the pilgrims were NOT big buds. In fact, the pilgrims regularly raided and stole from the Wampanoag. Nice folk, eh?
Remember Squanto, the pilgrim’s best red helper? He was a slave. Sure he was helpful – that was his damn job and his way of surviving.

The original Thanksgiving, by the by, was one of the pilgrim’s usual harvest fests that got a little outta control.

In 1621, when the Pilgrims were celebrating a successful harvest, they were shooting guns and cannons into the air. The Wampanoag chief and 90 warriors made their way to the settlement in full warrior mode—in response to the gunfire. As the Huffington Post’s Richard Schiffman puts it, “It remains an open question, however, whether the Wampanoag were actually invited, or if they crashed the party.” (source)

It wasn’t until old Abe Lincoln came around that the myth of Thanksgiving became enshrined. The holiday has everything to do with the Civil War and a great Prez attempting to bring the divided country back to together.

What will I do on Thursday? I'll start it at the Y, attempting to swim off the calories in advance. This year's McMurrer feast will be at Jen and Oni's house. Convenient! I'm not one for big parties – can't lipread big gangs of jibber-jabbering partiers. Keeping up and involved is impossible.  So that I can attend and be more than a doorstop, everyone's gonna have their iPhone voice recog devices handy. That and Jen will likely sign for me.

I'm cautiously optimistic