I kissed a girl just to try it. I hope my boyfriend don't mind it.

Thanksgiving originally was a feast of thanks held by the Pilgrims (and other various colonial groups, aka the Spanish in Florida in the 1500s well before the Pilgrims) after good harvests. When they had drought, there would be no thanksgiving meals. Instead they would fast. The Puritans made the tradition an annual feast in 1630 and eventually the tradition stuck in the most of the colonies and eventually all of America.

These days were actually marked days of prayer and fasting. Which is basically the opposite of what goes on today since Thanksgiving in non-religious and we gorge ourselves on enough food to feed a small village. It was made a national holiday during the Civil War by Lincoln in 1863. They evidently had a lot to be thankful for when the war was raging amongst the states.

The thing that has always bothered me about our traditional Thanksgiving story is the emphasis on the Native Americans. We are told how the colonies would not have survived the earliest days without the local help and that they all shared in this meal together. How then did we quickly go from this ideal scene to pushing the tribes further from the coast by gun? Eventually things became even worse, but in these days you'd have thought there would be fond remembrances of when the Native Americans saved all of their lives by bringing food and teaching them survival skills.

Turns out the Native Americans (aka just Squanto and Wampanoag tribe) near the Pilgrims were the only ones to really help out all that much and already had their own thanksgiving type festivals (as did the Pilgrims). The bond created by these two communities was probably not easily lost, just the Pilgrims became minor players in colonial life when compared to the giant Massachusetts Bay Colony of the Puritans. So maybe the "first" thanksgiving, the one of Pilgrims and Wampanoag, was the idyllic story we were brought up learning. Too bad that the rest of the colonies decided to be assholes to the "Indians".