WISHING YOU AND YOURS A WONDERFUL THANKSGIVING !

I HOPE EVERYONE HAS A WONDERFUL THANKSGIVING DAY !!
Click on the arrow in the middle of the screen below.





Thursday, November 23, 2006
"WE GATHER TOGETHER": The Most Authentic Thanksgiving Tradition
Posted by: Michael Medved at 3:51 PM


Most of the traditions surrounding Thanksgiving involve food, but none of the nourishment normally associated with the holiday – Turkey, stuffing, cranberries, sweet potatoes, pecan pie – played any role in the Pilgrims’ “First Thanksgiving” in 1621. Yes, they ate with the Indians (who turned up more or less uninvited, with 90 hungry warriors) but the main course was venison, freshly hunted from the woods. As Godfrey Hodgson makes clear in his fine, informative new book “A GREAT AND GODLY ADVENTURE: THE PILGRIMS AND THE MYTH OF THE FIRST THANKSGIVING” (I’ll be speaking with him about it on my radio show on Friday, at 4 PM Eastern Standard Time) there were no Turkeys in Massachusetts at that time, and cranberries were inedible without sugar (which didn’t arrive until fifty years later).

Among the foods frequently consumed today, the one Thanksgiving staple that most authentically connects with the Pilgrims (and their Puritan counterparts of the Massachusetts Bay Colony) is beer. They loved the stuff and brewed it themselves – as did many of their descendants, including “Sons of Liberty” leader Sam Adams –whose beer-making efforts (largely unprofitable for him, alas) helped inspire a contemporary (and much more successful) brewery to honor his name. In any event, as a fish-a-tarian (I eat vegetables, dairy products and kosher fish, but not meat or fowl) I will enjoy the consolation of some fine, expertly prepared craft beers this afternoon while the rest of my family (and more than 20 close friends) feasts on the turkey and gravy and stuffing.

Meanwhile, beyond the food focus of the holiday, what other Thanksgiving traditions can conscientious Americans honor in 2006?

There are actually two songs that have become part of the holiday for millions of people. “Over the River and Through the Woods, to Grandmother’s House we Go” captures the wintry, festive atmosphere of the day, and invokes childish delight in a a get –together with family and friends, but never touches on the underlying themes of the celebration—the Harvest Festival notions of gratitude and dedication.

Fortunately, the other enduring Thanksgiving song expresses those themes memorably. The hymn known as “We Gather Together” combines a simple, gorgeous, heart-felt melody with words that reflect relief and appreciation at our undying (and undeserved) deliverance by God from the oppressions and oppressors of this world:


We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing

He chastens and hastens his will to make known;

The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing

Sing praises to his name; he forgets not his own.


Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining

Ordaining, maintaining his kingdom divine;

So from the beginning the fight we were winning

Thou, Lord, was at our side; all glory be thine!


We all do extol thee thou leader triumphant,

And pray that thou still our defender will be.

Let they congregation escape tribulation;

Thy name be ever praised! O lord, make us free!



The song became popular in the early twentieth century as “The Thanksgiving Hymn” in part because its words fit so well with the story of the Pilgrims and their escape from religious persecution. The hymn is also old enough to have been known by them --- in its original form it was a Dutch folk song called “Wilder dan wilt,” beginning with the words, “Wilder than wild, who will tame me.” In less than twenty years the melody had been adapted by Dutch Protestants fighting against Spanish-Catholic oppression. The new first line, “Wilt heden nu treden” – loosely translated as “We gather together”—described and exalted a revolutionary act, since the nationalist dissenters were forbidden from joining together in worship.

In a fascinating piece for the Wall Street Journal in 2005, Melanie Kirkpatrick traced the roundabout journey of the great song. Since the Pilgrims spent time in Holland before their dangerous (and ultimately deadly) journey to the New World, they might have heard it, learned it and loved it --- but they wouldn’t have used it in church. The Pilgrims sang only Psalms in their services, restricting their hymns to settings of Biblical text. Despite its fervent religiosity, the recently composed words of “We Gather Together,” in either Dutch or English versions, wouldn’t have qualified.

Nevertheless, the song survived after its first appearance in print in a 1626 collection of Dutch patriotic songs and became instantly popular as in the English speaking world after its musical presentation in an arrangement by a Viennese choirmaster (published in Leipzig in 1877) and its subsequent translation by American scholar studying in Leipzig, Theodore Baker, in 1894. He published his English version (the same words we use today) as a choral “Prayer of Thanksgiving” in 1894. By 1903, the song began to make regular appearances in American hymnals.

There’s something profoundly American, of course, in the route taken by “We Gather Together” – from its Dutch (some curmudgeons say Danish) origins as a folk song, to its appropriation by Calvinist rebels as a hymn of faith and defiance, to its musical transmission in Germany, to an American scholar in Europe who provided English words and then sent the song across the sea.

In any event, the themes and the substance of “We Gather Together,” along with more than 100 years of American tradition (an eternity in terms of our young nation) make this hymn one of the most authentic and meaningful aspects of the holiday. The rousing conclusion (“Let thy congregation escape tribulation/Thy name be ever praised! O Lord make us free!) resonates forever among our people who have so often faced threats from the “wicked” who seek to oppress and distress us. Obviously, we face those threats again today, but we can remain thankful and confident that the God of the Pilgrims “still our defender will be.”


In short, whatever you serve at your Thanksgiving table, “We Gather Together” will provide even more nourishment. On this great national festival, let us put aside differences (even those painful divisions between believers and skeptics) and join in hoping that whatever powers (or Power) may rule our destiny may indeed, “make us free!”