Daily Ration Turned Remembrance: Five Grains of Pilgrim Corn
A full week was given to the first Thanksgiving feast in New England in 1621. Governor Bradford sent men to hunt deer and turkey and to call Massasoit’s tribe to the Pilgrim’s table. Out of this harvest festival came the American institution of Thanksgiving Day. It is peculiar to our people. No other nation has a celebration exactly like it. It does not honor a victory, mark a revolution, or commemorate the birth or death of a national hero. It is the great holiday of the common people. Thanksgiving is a national family celebration to thank God for the bounty wrought in liberty by our own labors.
Many descendants of the Pilgrims still follow the custom, begun on that first Thanksgiving Day in Plymouth, of placing five grains of corn beside each plate at the dinner table. Five grains of corn was the daily ration during those desperate days before the harvest when food was scarcely to be had. At each subsequent annual feast, the Pilgrims placed the grains at the table so that the reason for their rejoicing might not be forgotten.
The corn would remind them of the 63-day trip in the tiny Mayflower. It would speak to them of the days when there were only seven healthy colonists to care for the sick, and when already almost half their number were buried on a bleak and windswept hill. But the grains of corn would remind them of more than hardship and disaster. They would also recall that proudest fact of Pilgrim courage: that when spring came, and the Mayflower sailed home to England, every Pilgrim who survived the winter chose to remain in this new free land.
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