An open letter to policymakers on Florida’s real Thanksgiving

Dear Florida Policymakers:

On Thursday, we will all gather around tables to share a Thanksgiving meal with family and friends.

Throughout our lives, we are taught that Thanksgiving is this lovely tradition, started by the pilgrims and Native Americans somewhere up there near where the refs took the 2018 AFC Championship away from the Jaguars and gave it to the Patriots.

Like that game, the mythology of Thanksgiving is just another thing that the people of Massachusetts stole from Florida.

And Florida policymakers, it is time to fix this.

We’ve all been taught that the first Thanksgiving was served in 1621 near a small pebble they keep moving known as “Plymouth Rock.” But that simply is not the case. Nope, the first Thanksgiving occurred in Florida, in modern-day Jacksonville, and it happened some 60 years before the event we all celebrate on Thursday.

That’s right. America can thank Florida Man for Thanksgiving.

The basic history is this: Back in 1564, the French created a settlement in Jacksonville. This was the second attempt by French Huguenots to set up a base in Jacksonville. The French and the local native people, the Timucua, had a friendly and peaceful relationship, and to honor this friendship, French commander René de Laudonnière and the Timucua threw a feast of Thanksgiving.

On that day, according to Laudonnière’s diary, the two communities “assembled to render thanks to God, of our arrival felicitous and happy.”

I am not sure how you yell, “DUUUUVAL,” in French, but no doubt this happened.

But alas, history is written by the winners, and the French were soon thereafter massacred by the Spanish. Their settlement went away, and Laudonnière’s diary was lost and not published until long after he died, and thus the story of the real first Thanksgiving fell away.

We ended up with Pilgrim Thanksgiving because, well, the Plymouth Rock folks had better lobbyists. Unregistered lobbyist Sarah Josepha Hale, author of “Mary had a Little Lamb,” spent years lobbying Presidents that America needed a day of Thanksgiving to honor the pilgrim dinner. She finally succeeded when President Abraham Lincoln saw her idea as a way to bring people together during the Civil War.

I suspect Hale, unlike ethical lobbyists, failed to tell the President the other side of the story, that the Pilgrims stole the idea from Florida Man. But, as they say in the game, “If you aren’t at the table, you are on the menu,” and, well, the Florida Man side of history wasn’t at the table. And thanks to Hale, we now eat dry turkey.

While we can never get back the opportunity for America to see Blake Bortles hoist the Lombardi — I do appreciate Tom Brady later admitting what America has long known: Miles Jack was not down — YOU, Florida policymakers can right this historical wrong and take back something else that was stolen from us: Thanksgiving.

I have no doubt that Big Turkey will put up a real fight, but history is on our side. We have an opportunity to ensure future generations know the truth — that the first Thanksgiving wasn’t done with silly hats, but in fact done in pure Florida Man style, drinking cheap alcohol while eating alligator and oysters somewhere on a beach on the 30th of June, 1564, in Jacksonville.

Let us declare June 30 as Florida Thanksgiving, so future generations of Florida Men and Women can take pride in knowing they were the ones who started this great American tradition.

DUUUUUUUUVAL!

___

Steve Schale is a Florida Man, political strategist and Associate at The Advocacy Group. In 2008, he managed Barack Obama’s Florida operation and returned in 2012 as a senior adviser. In 2019, he took the helm of Unite the Country, a pro-Joe Biden Super PAC.