And here is the official Halluci Nation version:
The Neon Nativez remix is my favorite, much higher energy. It brings the Wednesday Adams lines to the front with a crazy electronic drop after. The original plays it cooler and drops the Wednesday speech at the end with screaming.
I read recently that Thanksgiving as we celebrate it today was created by Abraham Lincoln during one of his famous proclamations:
It has seemed to me fit and proper that they [our freedoms] should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.
Thus, a national day of Thanksgiving was established to unify all the informal Thanksgivings celebrated in every state across the country. Lincoln did this to help heal the nation after the civil war killed over 600,000 American men.
In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things.
Lincoln extols the miraculous nature of American prosperity despite the ravaged of war. The Thanksgiving mythology of pilgrims dining with natives, then, either existed independently or was affixed later than Lincoln. Perhaps the entire story of the Massachusetts pilgrims was made up retroactively? People have probably researched this.
Either way, we can’t escape the story now. The first Americans would have frozen to death if it weren’t for the locals. I’ve read that the pilgrims broke into and raided the winter caches of the local Indians who were away from the coast for the winter in order to survive. What a sorry lot!
I also learned that Jamestown (started 1607) in Virginia was the first surviving British colony in the Americas, with multiple abandoned attempts to colonize coming before. The pilgrims that I am biased toward as a New Englander came after aboard the Mayflower, in 1620.