Growing up, my favorite holiday was Christmas. Then, when I got to be about 10 years old, my parents revealed that Santa, and happiness more generally, was a cruel myth. Halloween reigned supreme from about the onset of double-digits to my mid-twenties. Once I could no longer get away with trick-or-treating, I started marking my calendar in eager anticipation for when thinly applied face paint would act as an excuse to get fucked up on a random weekday. But by the time I started staring down the barrel of 30, what was once my least favorite holiday had become my favorite. Looking forward to eating as much food as physically possible—even if it's alongside the same duplicitous family members who originally lied to my face about Santa—is one of the few things that makes my life on Earth seem bearable now that I've become too old to believe in magic, beg for free candy, or endure crippling hangovers at work.
I'm apparently not alone. Millions of Americans travel across state lines in the lead-up to the third Thursday in November, and as the holiday season approached this year, I found myself questioning why. I wanted to believe it was for a reason more significant than pumpkin pie and parades, because the alternative—that oblivion-by-food is our only reprieve from endless suffering—was too dark to accept. Ultimately, I deigned to embark on a quest to see if I could make myself think of Thanksgiving as something deeply meaningful, or even profound. I understand, intellectually, that women had no autonomy over their bodies in the 1600s, and that sex was probably the only fun (some) people could have back then, but watching movies like The Witch (pronounced "the V-Vitch," by the way) taught me to believe that life was unspeakably bleak. How did people even think procreation was ethically acceptable, never mind find a reason to party? And why are we still carrying on the tradition of ringing in the fall harvest with friends and family nearly 400 years later? I decided the best way to answer these questions was to inhabit the likeness, and hopefully the mindset, of someone who had actually been on the Mayflower.
I would call up a handful of historians and help me construct a plan about how to pull off this admittedly stupid stunt the weekend before Thanksgiving. They would tell me how to eat, what to wear, and what stuff I wasn't allowed to do besides the obvious of not using electricity or plumbing. I ended up with an apartment misted in pee, a churning stomach, and hands covered in blood. I can't say I was totally surprised.
In my chats with Peter Cooper Mancall, a historian at the University of Southern California, he stressed that the Pilgrims were extraordinarily preoccupied with the state of their souls. After collapsing into bed, I did some soul-searching myself. Living without my phone or computer for just a short while threw into relief just how much modernity revolves around distracting ourselves from existential questions and human interaction. Rather than contemplate the meaning of life, we prefer to endlessly scroll through Instagram and see other people present their best public versions of it. The Pilgrims were far more complex than the caricatures we think of them as today. These were people who had no entertainment options apart from spending time with each other and thinking about what happens after we die. Even though their heads were filled with what we now know to be absurdities, like the idea that a comet passing overhead would make you sick, they certainly had rich interior lives. Not to mention a sense of divine purpose, even if it included killing a bunch of people whose land you took over to build a brewery.
"They lived lives that might seem very hard by our standards, but they were normal to them and they found New England a good place to raise large families," Mancall had said. "And the ones who got these colonies going, the first generation or the migrants, did think, to borrow a phrase from The Blues Brothers, that they were on a mission from God. They were going to America to create new communities, a 'city on a hill,' as John Winthrop put it, and any sacrifices someone felt were likely worth it to achieve that goal."
My weekend of living like a Pilgrim was basically the worst hangover of all time. Instead of swaddling myself in blankets, I had to wear an itchy get-up that smelled and was full of dust. I couldn't have water or coffee. I had no delicious food to sop up the un-ending stream of Budweiser and O'Douls coursing through my body. That intensified the good things—a lot. When I finally had some brief company on Saturday after a long day of reading my incredibly obtuse theological tome and thinking about the profundity of the human spirit, I almost cried from happiness. Given that a life of extreme austerity makes even the most minor stimulation feel overwhelmingly great, it's impossible to imagine how tight a night of feasting and light boozing must have been for people who had just spent 66 days on a boat and then thought they were going to starve to death when they arrived in the New World.
Despite my seconds-long aversion to meat, my first post-experiment meal ended up being chicken wings. I already knew I was the kind of stereotypical virtue-signaling millennial who rails against Amazon but orders her chamber pots on Prime, though I guess I learned that I suck even more than I thought. And my initial thoughts about Thanksgiving—that it's just a manufactured break in the banality of existence—didn't really change as a result of my weekend of living as a Pilgrim. The only difference is that I now think there's something sort-of beautiful about that idea.
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