We really can\u2019t imagine what it was like for those first incredibly hearty souls on that first Thanksgiving day. They had cross the ocean on a rickety sailing ship that would strike fear into our hearts, back in a time when disease was more common and harder to treat. They boarded with vermin and rodents; sharing their wretched meals with them too. They traveled through storm tossed waters, with the boat creaking and groaning all around them. Even good days and \u2018smooth sailing\u2019 has to be set in the context of their \u2018sanitation\u2019 \u2013 or a lack thereof – that would be unimaginable for us today. Surviving that harrowing passage, when they arrived on the New World\u2019s shores, of course they knelt on the ground, thankful to have survived the journey. Later they would be thankful to learn how to catch and grow food from Native people whom they couldn\u2019t communicate so readily with as you or I would. Surviving the wet, the cold, the heat, the travel, the sicknesses and the strangers with whom they\u2019d build bonds stronger than modern steel. They survived the building of what to us would be primitive hut-like structures – thankful to be alive, thankful for even that shelter – because some they\u2019d traveled with had doubtlessly failed to survive\u2026<\/p>