Written by Alice Dalgliesh, this little book is called, simply, The Thanksgiving Story.Ī Caldecott Honor Book, The Thanksgiving Story follows one family from the harbor of Southampton, through the changing seasons, until the harvest and celebration we remember.
It’s a great story, and I’ve taken to reading our favorite re-telling each year at the feasting table on Thanksgiving Day. It’s a story of people who, when finally blessed with abundance, were humbly eager to recognize divine mercy, and to respond with generosity. The Thanksgiving story is a one of sincere, flawed, courageous people who made mistakes, and suffered loss, and walked through the valley of the shadow of death only to be confronted by the threat of starvation. Stranger still (to me), every child has a first time to hear the story, and a first time to remember hearing it–and the remembering rarely happens upon the second hearing! I think it’s important that the first many tellings convey the bright kernel at the center. The funny thing is, however, no child knows this too-familiar story until it is told to them. It’s a complex story, with plenty of food for thought about the effects of colonialism, the experiment in communal living, and so on, and we probably take it too much for granted. Yes, I mean the story of the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth.
Not only is it specifically devoted to the virtue of gratitude over consumption, but it even offers us a way past the too-abstract notion of “being thankful,” by means of a story.
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