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Hear that? That's what it sounds like when you plant more trees than you harvest. Work done by thousands of working forest professionals like Adam, a district forest manager who works to protect our forests from fires. Keeping the forest fire-resistant synonymous with keeping a forest healthy. And we do that through planting more than we harvest and mitigate those risks through active management.
It's a long-term commitment. Visit WorkingForestsInitiative.com to learn more. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. All season long, we're playing Thanksgiving stories. It's one of our favorite holidays, and so much of the tradition surrounding it concerns things we value here on this show.
Family, faith, and food. It's also Joy Neil Kidney's favorite holiday. She's one of our show's regular contributors and listeners. Out in Des Moines, Iowa, where she records stories about her family's life and her life. It can often be heard here.
She also listens to us on 1040WHO, one of our very best and earliest affiliates. In keeping with the spirit of the holiday season, today Joy shares the story Of the first Thanksgiving and how that relates to the first. to her own family. Take it away, Joy. We all know the story of Thanksgiving.
A hundred pilgrims came over on the Mayflower, stepped out on Plymouth Rock with their buckled shoes, and were greeted by Indians who proceeded to teach them to plant corn with fish. They had a big Thanksgiving dinner. with Turkey. cranberry sauce. and pumpkin pie with Cool Whip, right?
A newspaper once noted that Thanksgiving is a holiday that has no religious affiliation. and that the whole tradition centers around food. School children are taught that it celebrates how nicely the Pilgrims and Indians got along. But the Pilgrim's faith in God is why we celebrate any of it. John and Joan Tilley believe that the Church of England did not teach God's word as they found it in their Bible.
They were required to attend Anglican services but they also met with other believers to study the Bible, which was against the law.
So when their daughter Elizabeth was a toddler, they fled to Holland with other English separatists. Though the Dutch were tolerant, they were more baudy and did not observe the Sabbath. And the English children like Elizabeth Tilly started speaking Dutch and becoming more like them.
So after a dozen years in Holland, a band of pilgrims decided to establish an English colony in the New World. Two ships set sail in August of sixteen twenty. but one of them began to leak.
So they turned back. That ship was left behind. Forty separatists, including Mattilles, and sixty some others, recruited by London businessmen, crowded on to the Mayflower. finally embarking on September 20. During the 65-day trip, they ran into a storm.
When the crowded conditions became unbearable, John Howland, an indentured servant. Climb to the deck for fresh air. He was washed overboard. Luckily for us descendants, John Howland got caught in the hollyards and was rescued. By the time the tired band finally spotted land, one person had died, and a new baby was born.
one hundred two souls arrived. The Mayflower dropped anchor off Cape Cod, where 41 men signed the Mayflower Compact. the first agreement for self government and rule of law in the New World. Our nation's foundations are undergirded by the faith of this handful of hardy believers. That first winter, about half of them died while they were anchored off Massachusetts.
Both parents of 13-year-old Elizabeth Tilley died.
So did her uncle. Edward Tilley and his wife.
Now an orphan, Elizabeth moved in with Governor and Mrs. Carver. along with two other girls. But before summer arrived the carvers had also died. No one knows who took in the girls next.
When the Mayflower returned to England in 1622, just half the original number of pilgrims watched the ship disappear from sight. Of the 18 pilgrim wives and mothers who had left England, only a few survived. By October, when the Pilgrims invited the Wampanawags to the harvest feast, four women and five teenage girls, three of them the sole survivors of their families, cooked and served what we now think of as the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving. Elizabeth Tilley was fourteen.
Okay. When I was 14, my family of four drove a few miles on Iowa's World Gravel Roads to a Klan Thanksgiving dinner at Grandpa and Grandma Neal's. 12 grown-ups and 13 cousins. My only duties the Thanksgiving of nineteen fifty eight were to help carry things in from the car and to help my cousins do the dishes afterwards. The rest of the time was spent in cousin talk.
about junior high, band, and basketball. I taught Cousin Ken to dance rock and roll in the farmhouse's unfinished basement next to rows and rows of glass jars of grandma's summer canning. Uh Every Thanksgiving morning, we were awakened by the aroma of warm yeast. My mother's specialty for the feast were her cloverleaf rolls with pecans gooed to the bottoms with brown sugar and butter. we'd find our aproned mother in the kitchen.
With her hair in rollers, standing over a huge Tupperware bowl of smooth blonde dough. ready to form the blob into nice neat rolls. With oiled hands, she'd deftly pinch off a perfect quarter-sized ball. working her left thumb and forefinger, pushing up from below with her other hand. she'd nestle it into the cup of a muffin tin, on to a bed of whole pecans, melted butter, and brown sugar.
leaving room for two more little orbs of dough. Her swift and effortless plucking, squeezing, and pinching soon had filled all the sections in four muffin tins. while the four dozen rolls were left to rise. Mom had time to clean up in the kitchen and herself. But spending every Thanksgiving morning standing in the kitchen was getting to be a job for a snowy haired woman in her eighties.
I even tried making them, but they were certainly an anemic version of my mother's. Back to Ancestor Elizabeth Tilly's Thanksgiving. When she was fourteen she helped cook and serve a harvest feast. venison, wild fowl, turkeys, Indian corn. The forty eight Englishmen Plus nighty Wampanawags.
That's what we call the first Thanksgiving feast in America. and it lasted three days. About three years later, Elizabeth Tilley married John Howland. the man who survived being washed overboard. and who was the thirteenth signer of the Mayflower Compact.
John and Elizabeth Howland had ten children. Their descendants, including us Neils, are scattered all over the globe. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Among many other things, we thank God for so many blessings. including family.
even for that long ago ancestor, who as a teenager helped serve the first Thanksgiving feast. 400 years ago. And a terrific job in the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery, and a special thanks to Joy Neil Kidney. Who's sharing this story with us? And she's a listener on 1040 WHO in Des Moines, one of our very first affiliates, all the way back in 2016.
It's been that long. A special thanks to the folks there and to Joy, who's done any number of terrific stories for us. And by the way, share your stories with us. Go to Our American Stories and click the Your Stories tab. Write up something, send it to us.
And who knows, maybe your story will make it to Our American Stories. And by the way, what's remarkable about Joy's story is not just that she connects that 14-year-old who had prepared that food during the first Thanksgiving to her own story as a 14-year-old preparing for Thanksgiving with her family, but her family were descendants of the Mayflower. And we hear that story over and over again on our history stories, the connection between our past and our present. My family at the first Thanksgiving. Ear.
On our American stories. Then the space hamster flew his hot air balloon all the way to the bottom of the ocean. Where did that story come from? Book? Dream?
Nope, it came from a conversation. Meet Miko Mini Plus, the AI companion that co-creates personalized story adventures with your child in real time. What color was the hamster's cape? And what did he pack for lunch? Unlock your child's imagination.
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