Thanksgiving 2025 and the Plymouth Colony

by Allan Wall, ©2025

(Nov. 26, 2025) — Thanksgiving 2025 is upon us. Happy Thanksgiving to all !

The concept of thanksgiving to God is from the Bible. The readers of I Thessalonians 5:18 are exhorted thusly: “In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”

In the One Hundredth Psalm, verse 4, the Psalmist exhorts his listeners to 
Enter into his gates with thanksgiving,
and into his courts with praise:
be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

The American Thanksgiving holiday owes its origin to the famous meal of 1621, which the English colonists (popularly known as the Pilgrims) and their Wampanoag Indian allies celebrated.

I’d heard that story since childhood, but this past year, for the first time in my life, I actually visited Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the Pilgrims landed, established their colony and held their 1621 Thanksgiving feast .

It was part of a trip with my wife and son, a tour of the Northeast. We visited 15 states and 2 Canadian provinces. (See The Great Northeastern Tour for more about that.)

Here’s a map of Massachusetts by regions. Note “Plimouth Plantation” on the lower right, that’s the place I’m talking about:

A sign at the entrance to the municipality reads “Welcome to Plymouth, America’s Hometown”. And indeed, Plymouth and the other English colonies were the foundation of our nation.

At Plymouth, we visited a seaworthy replica of the original Mayflower. Like the original, this one has also crossed the Atlantic.

The Mayflower was not a passenger ship. In the 1600s there were only warships or cargo ships, and the Mayflower was a chartered cargo ship. Imagine crossing the Atlantic on a crowded cargo vessel, with no radio, no radar, no GPS. But they did it.

This is Leyden street, the first street the Pilgrims set up.

Obviously, these are not the original 1620s houses. The Pilgrims and their descendants didn’t think they needed to preserve their original houses for the benefit of 21st-century tourists. Instead, they continued to modernize their housing through the years.

So for the tourists, a replica of Leyden Street as it was in the 1620s was constructed a few miles away. It’s called Plimoth Patuxet. There you can see what the original colony looked like.

We have a running joke in our family about “fake” tourist attractions. My son calls any tourist attraction that’s not 100% original “fake”. By that standard, Plimoth Patuxet is “fake” But as fakes go, it’s a very impressive one!

Here’s the fort at the top of the hill:

Read the rest and see additional photos here.