Thanksgiving: Why It Is America’s Foundational Holiday

Thanksgiving is really the holiday that made the other American holidays possible. Were it not for the Pilgrims having courage, absolute faith in their cause and calling, and the willingness to sacrifice and risk everything, they never would have attempted to cross a vast ocean on the 94-foot Mayflower, a ship of questionable seaworthiness.
The Pilgrims’ fourth major achievement was the rejection of socialism and the adoption of private enterprise.
The Thanksgiving holiday, which commemorates one part of the Pilgrim story, remains the favorite holiday for many Americans. And for good reasons, beyond enjoying a feast. With our country passing through troubled times, it is worth revisiting the Pilgrim’s five significant achievements, which created the seminal story of America, and reveals remarkable insight into who we are and the qualities of character we need to overcome our present challenges.
First, of the many groups of settlers who came to America, only the Pilgrims were singularly motivated by a spiritual quest for religious freedom — one that had its origin with the Protestant Reformation a century before. William Bradford, the long-serving governor of Plymouth Colony and author of Of Plymouth Plantation (written between 1630–1651), repeatedly framed the Pilgrims’ voyage and settlement in explicitly biblical terms, drawing direct parallels to the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land.
Thus, both American Christians and Jews find profound meaning in the Pilgrim’s Thanksgiving story.
After a harrowing passage across the Atlantic — one that included wild pitching and broadside batterings by gale force winds and ferocious seas that caused the splitting of the ship’s main beam — the Mayflower was blown off course from arriving at the territory assigned by the London-based sponsoring Virginia Company — a territory that is now northern New Jersey.  Making landfall on the barren sands of Cape Cod, the Pilgrims knew not where they were nor how to proceed. ...