This is one of the reasons I am thankful for Thanksgiving. For weeks, I have been thinking about getting together with my family, setting up the tables, and enjoying the feast prepared just for this day. It reminds me that thankfulness ought to be my daily attitude. Even as Easter is the day we celebrate the Lord’s provision for our soul, Thanksgiving is a day we celebrate the Lord’s provision for our body. “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8) is particularly apropos.

The Lord does provide. Our Thanksgiving tradition springs from the experience of the pilgrims, as every child who has traced their hand in crayon to make a turkey learns.

The early colonists suffered great hardship when they first arrived in the new world. The deaths from starvation and illness are staggering, especially when you consider how few survived the trip across the Atlantic in the first place.

William Bradford, governor of the colony, penned a history which documents the achievements these early settlers enjoyed, and the misery they suffered. What I find remarkable is that so much of their misery was irrefutably self-inflicted.

When you think about the pilgrims and America’s first Thanksgiving, words like socialism probably don’t spring to mind. But while this is part of our history rarely taught in grammar school, the fact is that socialism very nearly erased the story – and the colony itself.

Bradford wrote in his History of the Plymouth Plantation that everything produced in the colony – including the pilgrims’ homes – belonged to the colony. Centuries before Karl Marx penned the words, the pilgrims lived “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Bradford reported that the “taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth” failed to make the pilgrims “happy and flourishing.” In fact, it produced the opposite effect. Bradford wrote that the most industrious colonists quickly grew tired of carrying the weight of the colony on their shoulders. He observed that a few “less industrious” colonists demonstrated to everyone else that it didn’t matter how hard you worked, or how little you produced, everyone still got an equal share.

Unfortunately, this led to a terrible shortage of food, just in time for a brutal winter. Starvation and exposure led to the deaths of more than half of the colony that winter, forcing those remaining to dump their socialistic ideals in exchange for survival.

Each family was deeded their own home and property, so that each would, in Bradford’s words, “in that regard trust to themselves.”

More, from Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Plantation.

This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been…The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability…

It is my hope on this Thanksgiving that we learn from the lessons of that first Thanksgiving. Because it wasn’t until families were provided their own land and allowed to cultivate and keep the fruits of their labor did the new world yield its abundance. Even the best people are susceptible to the vices of sloth and envy, and socialism is a breeding ground for both.

If the Plymouth colonists were insufficiently righteous to make socialism work, then nobody is.

And yet, our leaders in Washington are steering this nation down that very same path. They are leading us toward that place where government is discouraging everyday Americans from the very thing that has made this nation prosper.

We are fooling ourselves if we think we can repeat the pilgrims’ folly and not repeat their results.

Among the many things I am thankful for, I count the blessing of history. My Thanksgiving prayer is that we learn from our long-past brothers and sisters so that we do not repeat their experience.