Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Thanksgiving in New England--no parties or football

© 2013 Christy K Robinson

This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.  
All rights reserved. This book or blog article, or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.


The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony grew tobacco and brewed their own beer. So did the Puritan settlers of Boston, Salem, and the many new towns that dotted Massachusetts, Connecticut, Long Island, and Rhode Island. There was a “tobacco house” on the Dyer farm in Rhode Island. 

Gov.  John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay and his son John of Connecticut dispensed medicines, some of which were made with “aqua vitae,” also known as whiskey.

Gov. Winthrop, the father, had smoked tobacco until the late 1620s, then gave it up, cold turkey, as a sacrifice to God: he didn't want such a pleasant intoxicated feeling to interfere with his ascetic life before God. Winthrop also stopped the custom of toasting at his own table because it had overtones of pagan libations to the gods.

The Puritans loved their recreation (fishing, hunting, military exercises), but they didn't play football (soccer/kickball). At the time, English football was on par with the Afghan game of goat-head-polo! The teams of young men would kick a leather ball through village streets, down gullies, across hilltops, through fields of food crops--destroying everything, including one another, in their path to gain possession of the ball.

However, we can be quite sure that the Puritans did not hang around in a mixed-gender party boat, wearing undershirts, with the women showing cleavage and uncovered hair.

Here’s an article posted in this blog in 2012 about how New Englanders celebrated Thanksgiving in the early colonial years:  http://marybarrettdyer.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-english-colonists-celebrated.html

And this article shows some of the recipes for foods that would have been eaten in England at the same time period.

Happy Thanksgiving!

*****

Christy K Robinson is author of these sites:  

and of these books:

·          We Shall Be Changed (2010)
·          Mary Dyer Illuminated (2013)
·          Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This (2014)
·          The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport (2014)
·          Effigy Hunter (2015)
·          Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)


http://www.amazon.com/Christy-K-Robinson/e/B004S7UTNE/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

No comments:

Post a Comment

Reasonable, thoughtful comments are encouraged. Impolite comments will be moderated to the recycle bin. NO LINKS or EMAIL addresses: I can't edit them out of your comment, so your comment will not be published. This is for your protection, and to screen out spam and porn.