God calls us to be a thankful people (1 Thess. 5:18), and such thanks was powerfully modeled to us by the Pilgrims in Plymouth in 1621. Following a harsh start where half their number died due to sickness and starvation, they gathered the next Fall to celebrate God’s goodness. Joined by local Indians such as Chief Massasoit and Squanto, they feasted, played games, and gave thanks to their Maker for blessing them with an abundant harvest.
In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by special guest Al Burke, give practical tips on how to celebrate Thanksgiving Day as a family. Along with fitting songs to sing, they suggest fun games to play rooted in Pilgrim history, special Psalms to rehearse, and Thanksgiving Proclamations and other period accounts to read aloud—all designed for families to enjoy a rich and memorable day of thanks together.
Check Out These Resources as you Plan Your Thanksgiving Day Celebration:
Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford
Resource on the Pilgrims history and early Thanksgiving celebrations
Read Online / Purchase Online
Magnalia Christi Americana by Cotton Mather
Explores the blessings of God on early America
First Thanksgiving Account by Edward Winslow
An eyewitness account of the first Thanksgiving
Continental Congress “Thanksgiving Proclamation” (November 1, 1777)
A one-page proclamation for Thanksgiving
George Washington’s “Thanksgiving Proclamation” (October 3, 1789)
A historical thanksgiving proclamation
Abraham Lincoln’s “Thanksgiving Address” (October 3, 1863)
A thanksgiving and repentance address during the Civil War
The Ainsworth Psalter
Used by Pilgrims for singing Psalms, historically tied to early Thanksgiving.
Download PDF / Purchase Online
It's time for Thanksgiving, and we want to rejoice, and we want to talk about a lot of different ways to rejoice, and Jason and I have got Al Burke with us, who I'm just saying he's the king of Thanksgiving. He puts on the neatest Thanksgiving celebration at his house. A lot to learn from him, but we're going to talk about a lot of things to really enhance a culture of giving thanks in our homes and in our churches. Hope you enjoy the discussion. Okay, so Jason, it's the Thanksgiving season.
We love Thanksgiving. We're thankful that God calls us to be a thankful people. There are lots of worse holidays than that. No kidding! Think about that!
They give us a day off to give thanks, man! To God, originally. I'm taking it. Let's do it. So yeah, we have Al Burke with us here.
Al, we go to church together. Al is, Al is the king of Thanksgiving. He has the best Thanksgiving celebration. I'm always tempted to crash it, but I always have too many of my family members over. Al, hey, thanks for joining us.
My pleasure guys. Really happy to be here. Yeah. You know, before the broadcast, I was pulling out my Thanksgiving books that I pull out, you know, of Plymouth plantation. Let's go up here, Scott.
There it is. Thank you, bro. Yeah, Plymouth Plantation. That's a good one. But I pull out Cotton Mathers' Magnellia Christi Americana, which is the glorious works of Christ in America.
I just want to start, you know, this is indigenous people's abuse today for a lot of people, but not for us. It's what God has done. And I just want to read this. This is in the first page of Magnaeo Christi, the first volume. It has been deservedly esteemed, one of the great and wonderful works of God in this last age, that the Lord stirred up the spirits of so many thousands of his servants to leave the pleasant land of England, the land of their nativity, and to transport themselves and families over the ocean sea into a desert land in America at the distance of a thousand leagues from their own country.
And this merely on the account of pure and undefiled religion, not knowing how they should have their daily bread, but trusting in God for that in the way of seeking first the kingdom of God and the righteousness thereof, and that the Lord was pleased to grant such a gracious presence of his with them, and such blessing upon their undertakings, that within a few years a wilderness was subdued before them, and so many colonies planted, towns erected, and churches settled wherein the true and living God in Christ Jesus is worshipped and served in a place and a time out of mind had been nothing before but heathenism, idolatry, and devil worship. And Cotton Mather just goes on and on explaining the blessings of God on America. Well, that's what we get to do in Thanksgiving, and that's what we want to talk about now. So, it's good to celebrate Thanksgiving, and the Lord commands us to give thanks. But I just want us to talk about different ways that we celebrate Thanksgiving and Al, that's why we have you here, because you have a very well-ordered, beautiful Thanksgiving celebration.
So tell us about what you do. Well Scott, It's kind of built up over the years. I think we first started thinking about different ways to celebrate Thanksgiving when our kids were very young, around the year 2000. And we wanted to introduce, not only being thankful to God for the blessings to us today, but also a bit of the history of the nation, the pilgrims, and how Thanksgiving kind of celebrates that particular event and how God used it in the formation of the United States. And then we also wanted to reach out to other people that didn't have a place to go.
So over the years it's kind of morphed into, I think we had a maximum a couple years ago of 75 people in our home. We clear the living room, we line up tables, we have an amazing amount of food. We also implement, and this started early on with our own children, but now involves other kids and our grandchildren. They all take on a character, or many of them do a character on the Mayflower, and they'll get up and give testimony about how the journey was, their life, the hardships, the blessings. And some of them are pilgrims, some are Indians.
And we always have Desquantum or Squanto there, Chief Massasoit is there talking to how his word will never be broken. He's made the agreement with the pilgrims. It's really, and then the rest of the people are the audience. There's you know, 40, 50 people in the audience there. Then we move into some replicating the games that the, they had the first Thanksgiving.
We have several different types of outdoor sports, exercising of arms and whatnot, nothing too crazy hatchet throw hatchet throwing. There was some years there's BB gun shooting. There's a tug of war and apple roll around the property and so on. And then maybe 10 years ago, we implemented a tradition that was first thought of by my late mother-in-law. She thought it would be a good idea to have everybody write down something they're thankful for and throw it in a basket.
So now everyone who comes does that when they get there and we pass that basket around and different people read. You're not allowed to read your own, but we do that while we're having dessert. And for dessert, we have maybe eight or nine different kinds of pies. You know, it's fun to see, you know, the dads are thankful for the blessing of the promotion at work and for being able to take care of my family and this and that. The kids are saying, I'm thankful for water when I'm thirsty.
I'm thankful for daddy reading me a story at night or something. These things are simple that the kids have, but I would challenge an adult, try going without water for three or four days. You'd be very thankful for it too. So it's interesting to see all the aspects. But that's just a small snippet of some of the things we do.
And then one last thing we do, and we've introduced this a few years ago, is clear the tables out at the end of the night and have a little, what they call, Virginia Real barn dance. I think Scott, even your mother came to one of those. Oh yeah. And had a wonderful time. She will not miss one of those at 95 years, 97 years old.
Yeah, she's amazing. She's on it. So if you can score an invite to the Burke Thanksgiving, you've done a good thing. That's exactly right. I'll tell you what's interesting about it too, Jason, is you know there are some people that come every year, there are other people that we have you know once or twice, and we've even had the strangers, like the checkout lady at Sam's, we invited one year, she came with her daughter.
So that was pretty cool. Unbelievable. I bet she'd never seen anything like that before. It was amazing. That's really neat.
You know, yeah, let's talk about different things. I love your your list and how you've done that. You know, the Scriptures have so much to say about giving thanks. We like to read Psalm 136 and have each person, you know, give a testimony of thanksgiving between, you know, each verse and sort of a responsive, you know, way of doing that. But there's so many things that are a blessing to do on Thanksgiving.
Hey, we want to say make a big deal out of Thanksgiving. We need it. We, you know, we need a spirit of Thanksgiving. There's so much bad news flying around in this world but frankly You know we live in the most wonderful country to live in in the world. That's my opinion I've been to several countries.
I don't want to live in those countries. I want to live in this country. And anyway, there's so much to give thanks for. So what are some other ideas about how to do it? So we actually have a psalm that is superscribed, a thanksgiving psalm.
A psalm of thanksgiving. There's only five verses. Let me just read verses four and five. They're very familiar. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise.
Be thankful to him and bless his name, for the Lord is good, his mercy is everlasting, and his truth endures to all generations." So thanksgiving is a big theme in the Bible. You find it from Genesis to Revelation. Thanksgiving is a duty, but it's even hard to think of it as a duty because God's been so good to us that he would need to compel us to give thanks is is is sort of to our shame and and ungratefulness is is is such a sin that it's actually a great blessing to have a day to just focus us in on this and have us stop our normal hubbub in order to just give thanks for all the good. We like to read the first Thanksgiving proclamation given in 1777 by the Continental Congress. It's really beautiful.
I'll just read a couple sentences. The duty of all men to adore the superintending providence of Almighty God, to acknowledge with gratitude their obligation to Him for benefits received. And it goes on. But it's very beautiful. It really directs the mind and the heart you know toward giving thanks.
It's beautiful. So moms and dads we're gonna give you really on a silver platter some resources that are just you know at your fingertips. If you Google Continental Congress Thanksgiving Proclamation, this will come up, and it's a one-pager, and it's wonderful. Governments never never talk like this anymore, but they used to talk like this and give thanks to God publicly, frequently. So you can have that off your printer in 60 seconds, and it's a wonderful read for the Thanksgiving table.
Hey, we're gonna put probably 10 or 15 things in our show notes that are like that links like the George Washington's proclamation October 3rd 1789 and and different things like that because there's so many places to go yeah so you said something about exercising your arms are you are you are you weightlifting or What are you talking about? Not in North Carolina. This is a hatchet throw. We always have a prize. There's age groups and gender there.
Whoever tops the category gets to take a hatchet home with them. We'll have target shooting. The little kids really enjoy an apple roll. You roll it with a spoon around the house. Now, I learned early on don't park my cars in the path of the apples because Some of the larger kids do tend to send them with some force.
Tug of war and so on. We've also had a corn husking contest with little kids who can husk the corn the fastest and things like that. Oh, I forgot to mention, a lot of people come in authentic period costume, you know so even if they're not in the play, they might be dressed as William Bradford or One of the Native Americans or something like that. So there's a good number of people not everybody but a good number that are in character and cost him when they're here. They slaughtered a deer, maybe more, it had to be more than one deer.
They tanned the hide and came as Indians dressed in deer skins. Then they were, they're absolutely beautiful. It was amazing. Yeah. That's kind of going above and beyond, but that did not a requirement for it.
Yeah. Right. Right. That was remarkable. Jason, you mentioned, you mentioned the Psalm.
We do that too, and sometimes we will read from the Geneva version to add a little bit of historical Pilgrim context on there. It's just an eloquent way to remember some of those passages. Because that's the Bible they would have been reading out of. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, it's a great time to celebrate victories of the year. You know, we've gone around and said, what are you thankful for? Another way to say that is celebrate some of the victories. What's what comes to mind? You know, You know, really good things that happened this year.
You know, families have needs, and families pray about their needs. And, you know, families who pray find many of their prayers answered. But celebrating victory is really, really important, I think, in a family. And Thanksgiving is a perfect, perfect way to do that. What else?
What are some of the other things? I'll just add that I think what you just said, Scott, is kind of what we do with those thankful cards. You know, you're some, not all of them are simple things, but, you know, significant prayers answered the salvation for my son or my daughter occurred this year, or, you know, so-and-so was healed of some ailment. Those kind of things are in there, too, and they're really, really meaningful. Some of them bring tears to your eyes when you're recognizing the goodness of God over the previous year.
Yeah. And you know, also explaining through Thanksgiving how we endured hard times. There are hard things that happen too in families, and God sustains us through the hard times. You know, remember the first winter of the pilgrims, half of them died. They were left with a very, very small group, and yet they rose up and they established a city set on the hill.
And we have so many blessings from the endurance and the fortitude that they had. And we have to teach our families how to thrive in the midst of adversity. Thanksgiving Day is a great day to just drive that home again, even in adversity. God sustains his people. So the first Thanksgiving was in 1621, after they had survived such a hard year, There were a lot of existential threats in that first year.
They survived them. They wanted to give thanks to God, so they gathered together and did that in 1621. That's 150 years before our revolution. So when you think, I mean, this, it goes back all the way to the very earliest days of our nation, long generations before our revolution anyway. So it really is part of our heritage.
Hey, the Pilgrims, they were lovers of music. They loved to sing and they sang the Psalms. You might check out the Ainsworth Salter, and that great song, We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing. That's a great one to start your meal with, you know. You might just think of some songs, hymns, spiritual songs to sing together before you eat or after you eat or whatever, but singing is a blessing because it lifts you up into another world that you need to be lifted up into.
And you know what, frankly, we need to be lifted out of our sorrows and singing and thanksgiving is just one of God's wonderful means of grace to take us to better places than our hearts often lead us. And anyway, you know, it's interesting. That song, We Gather Together, was sung during the Dutch persecutions in Holland. And the song was sung at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. So it's a song, you know, it's a culturally relevant kind of song on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
So moms and dads, let me give you just a handful of short resources, really easy to find. You can Google any of these. First, Google First Thanksgiving Edward Winslow. He was there and he gives an account of their dot time together with with their community with the indians that also brought provisions for this time Google first thanksgiving william bradford to get the same this is the half-page Google George Washington Thanksgiving Proclamation, this is from 1789. You've already mentioned Continental Congress Thanksgiving Proclamation, and then finally from 1863 you have Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving Address.
So this is happening right in the middle, right in the middle of the Civil War, And it is a mixture of thanksgiving and repentance. And it's in remarkable language. So anyway, these are things that are really easy to get your hands on, but great reads for the Thanksgiving table. Oh, that's great. You don't want to let Thanksgiving pass without quoting William Bradford in Palomar with Prontation.
I'm going to read it. We quote this every year. Thus out of small beginnings, greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things out of nothing and gives being to all things that are. And as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shown unto many." How true is that? And God has given us this great day to do it.
I pray God really gives y'all over there at the Burt place and y'all over at the domes and ourselves. It's just a wonderful experience. It's so right to be a thankful people. So thanks for joining us. Al, thanks for coming on.
Thank you. Happy, early things. That's right. Someday I'm going to come crash that party of yours, okay? Come on over, Scott, and you have an opening.
You know, one time I thought, you know, because I got this hayride, I was going to drive the hayride all the way up to your house, but I was kind of afraid I might lose a tire or something. It's a ways. That's right. Alrighty. If you did lose one, you can be thankful.
That's exactly right. We'll get through it. You'll come and rescue me. All right. Well thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and hope you can Join us next time.
Have a happy Thanksgiving.