Gather ‘round my children and ye shall hear of the story of how we got Thanksgiving, a time when Native Americans and pilgrims shared their goods with each other in an act of love and acceptance that would be recreated in tense suburban houses for the rest of forever.

Our story begins in 1492: Christopher Columbus and his band of sailors set foot in what they believed to be India. “This isn’t India,” said literally everyone, but Columbus didn’t really care. He was greeted by a group of Native Americans who welcomed him and his gang. Columbus repaid them by cutting off their hands, raping them and giving them diseases.

That’s not how they teach it in elementary schools but such is life. Columbus then said, “I like this, this is mine” and took their land. This is a tradition performed by white people for generations to come that I like to call “Columbusing.”

Fast forward a few short years to 1620, a group of Puritans attempting to escape the liberal hellscape known as London landed on Plymouth Rock. Puritans weren’t exactly the nice little salt and pepper shakers from the Publix commercials, they were kind of jerks. I mean these are the guys behind the Salem witch trials. They didn’t celebrate Christmas because the Bible didn’t explicitly say to, they had no chill. So one day they were going to have this feast: there’s actually not a lot of recorded history on the specific details as to the specific details but we know they had it. They sent out their men to kill some birds and they started the celebration.

Now, there wasn’t necessarily turkey, it was just bird. It could’ve been pigeon for all we know. So they get back and they were like, “There are native people out there” and the wives were like, “That sounds fake but okay.” So they fired their guns to scare the natives away and intimidate them. Like I said, they were jerks.

The natives are chillin’ and heard the bangs. They had never heard a gun before so they were like, “Let’s go see what that is.” So the pilgrims are cooking their pigeon and the Indians show up and are like, “Oh cool! Food!” so they just kinda stay. The pilgrims, being all Jesus-y, didn’t steer them away. The husbands were like, “Okay but they weren’t invited” and the wives were all, “Well honey we weren’t invited to their land SO.” This is like if you were cooking dinner and your roommate came out and was like, “Oh cool can I dip my plate now?” But the Native Americans were actually great, they brought things like deer meat to share. The pilgrims Columbused their foods and eventually contributed to the horrible things that happened to the Native Americans. They gave us corn, we gave them syphilis.

So that was the last anyone would hear about Thanksgiving for a long time. Okay so fast forward to the Lincoln presidency. Though there was a day sort of like Thanksgiving, it wasn’t called Thanksgiving. At that time, the only national holidays were George Washington’s birthday and the fourth of July. There was this woman named Sarah Josepha Hale. She was a rockstar, like a bad-ass. She was the editor of this magazine called the “Lady’s Book” and she was like Oprah or Martha Stewart of the day. She’s one of the first people to published Edgar Allan Poe, she made the bobble head a thing, and she wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” So she was like, “Guys, we need a national holiday dedicated to togetherness” and everyone was like, “Yeah, sure, okay.”

She lobbied for this for years and finally Abe Lincoln noticed her and was like, “Yeah, this bad-ass woman is absolutely right” and thus Thanksgiving a thing. So instead of focusing on racist puritans we should focus on how nice the Native Americans were and how bad-ass Sarah Josepha Hale was. The End.

Source: History Channel documentary while drunk, also this is satire take it with grain of salt.