Thanksgiving, like other parts of mainstream American identity, can feel a little Protestant. The Pilgrims, Englishmen who felt that the Church of England had become too popish, were certainly in protest, so much so that they had to leave their native lands to find somewhere even further from the Roman Catholic faith.
Anchoring in Cape Cod, they descended the Mayflower in what is now the state of Massachusetts. The romanticised notion that these brave people initiated a thanksgiving service within moments of landing is generally considered to be apocryphal. What is highly likely, however, is that these deeply religious men and women would have been near continuously praying as they went about their lives. Their prayers would have been more spontaneous than those of the established Church they left behind. Whilst modern scholarship generally considers the first event that laid the foundation for Thanksgiving as a three-day period somewhere between September and early November 1621, these were not their first prayers of thanks for their newfound land.
