The harvest festival season is two weeks away. Why harvesting was done in late November I don't know, but the Pilgrims had a lot to learn their Freshmen year in Plymouth Harbor. November was named for the 9th month of the Roman calendar and it's not even that, anymore. October ends with parties, costumes, and candy. When you wake up the next day, it's November. The sun is gone, the trees and grass are brown, and the temperatures drop drastically. The Finns (with whom I speak frequently) call November marraskuu, meaning "month of the dead". No doubt, November is a dark and cold month with an image problem in need of a serious makeover, which is why president Lincoln stepped in and established Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863, to be celebrated the 4th Thursday of November.

Though the timing sounds quite random, according to an online, free-content encyclopedia project written collaboratively by volunteers, this was not the case. Online history suggests that Mary Todd demanded Abe roll a pair of dice in order to "divine" the best time during the month of November for Thanksgiving Day celebrations. The President is said to have "crapped out" by rolling a four and a five respectively. The four designated the week in November to target, and the five signified the day of the week. The President is also reported to have "lost the pot" with this roll causing Mary Todd to be furious enough to beat Abe with a gifted, ornamental wooden shoe until he forked over enough tax collection proceeds for her to buy three fancy dresses, which leads us to Holland.

English Pilgrims fled to Holland for the freedoms it afforded their religious practice. They soon became appalled by the Dutch's frivolity and felt threatened by their dangerous ideas. The Pilgrim men decided the Dutch had too many of the "bad freedoms" and not enough of the "good ones", so they made a bargain with a UK corporation for seven years of indentured slavery to the company for free passage to the "new" world - talk about a dangerous idea. Imagine explaining that one to your wife and kids. It is assumed that the Pilgrim men told their wives about the deal after they landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts months later.

The Pilgrim men were responsible for all decisions, which is another dangerous idea because they concluded it was too hazardous to allow fires of any kind on the wooden ship that supported their voyage. Thus, for 65 days, the Pilgrims ate cold, uncooked food. This led to scurvy and the premature death of one of their "saints". I'll bet the women would have figured a way to use a cooking fire appropriately without burning down the Mayflower, AND found passage to America without enslaving themselves and their families for seven years. Who knows? If the women had a part in the decision-making they might have decided to stay in England in the first place and found a way to practice their faith in a compromised, but adequate fashion.

They might have decided the best route toward religious freedoms was to influence the incremental change of existing laws through Parliament. They certainly have a "gift area(s)" when it comes to influencing men. Collectively, they could stop all action in any house or branch of government with a simple promise of dampened blouses. It is important to remember they weren't (and still aren't) dealing with fully rational beings. If the lifestyle and freedoms offered by the Netherlands wasn't good enough for the Pilgrim men, what was?

Was the grass really greener on the other side of the Atlantic? I can hear the women even now, speaking sense to their obstinate husbands, discretely out of the earshot of those who might suppose they were questioning or unsupportive of their husband's decisions. If, in the entire Isle of Britain and now Holland no suitable environment could be found, what was the likelihood that an unsettled, hostile, and largely unknown continent across the ocean would be?

The Pilgrim men said God would endow them with the knowledge and gifts necessary to be fruitful and multiply when they arrived in the new world, but they wouldn't have survived a year or even seen a first harvest festival if a few well-intentioned "savages" hadn't taken pity on them and shown them how to plant crops that could sustain them through the winter.

To the Pilgrim men, everything was black and white - another dangerous idea.