As an aspiring historian and a soon to be educator, I wanted to write briefly on the topic of the Thanksgiving holiday that children, adolescents, and young adults will be celebrating across the nation in just a few days from now. In a time and age when myspace, facebook, youtube, NFL football games, and Playstation III will assuredly all be equal parts of the upcoming holiday season, I feel that it will be upon me to bring to light how integral the events were that played out in the woods, just off the Atlantic Ocean on Cape Cod in 1621 (I think...some historian).

By integral I not only mean for the English colonist but also the Wampanoag Indians that inhabited the southeastern shore of Massachusetts at this time. It was the first contact period for most natives and definitely as much for the English, who assuredly only heard tales and saw depictions of the natives as savage beasts.

When we view this event, at this time we are looking at the veins of what would soon be a new nation found, The New World discovered. From these early encounters on, the world in which we all live currently, in which we all succomb to those holiday vices (i.e. Playstations, Guitar Hero's, myspace, instant messaging, and text messaging), well, that world seized to exist by the encounters on that Cape Cod Beach, for us as European and African descendants and most defintely for the natives that lived off of these lands.

No matter where or what the upcoming holiday holds for us, it will be my duty, and one that I am assuredly looking forward to to engage the minids of my students in order for them to gain a real sense of what exactly this Thanksgiving holiday means to peoples everywhere.

Just a thought...Happy Thanksgiving. Someone's cell phone is ringing!