Lori Borgman: More than meets the eye to Thanksgiving

Lori Borgman, Tribune News Service on Nov 11, 2025

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We look at paintings of that first Thanksgiving more than 400 years ago, with tables sagging under the weight of wild game, venison, waterfowl, lobster and mussels, corn, beans and pumpkins We often sigh and say, “Life was so simple back then.”

It was simple. Life was so simple that heat in homes came from logs crackling in a fireplace. There was no central heat with digital thermostats to program or air filters to change. People had no dreaded gas and electric utility bills, but they also sometimes froze to death.

Life was so simple there were no complicated configurations of indoor plumbing, no hot water heaters with annoying calcium and lime buildup, nor reverse osmosis water filters.

Toileting was so simple they didn’t even have to flush. They just waited for a spring thaw and dug a new pit for the privy downwind from the cabin. If you had to go in the middle of the night, you either held it and hoped your bladder didn’t explode or walked through pitch black to the outhouse praying a bear wouldn’t eat you. Very simple. Hold it or possibly die.

With no sprawling hospitals, emergency rooms or urgent care clinics, disease and dysentery swept through communities wiping out multitudes in a single swath. Very simple. Here one day, gone the next.

As magnificent as the paintings are of that first Thanksgiving, they’re missing the smell of sweat and hard work, the sound of trees being felled, iron pots clanging and the warm feel of fresh kill being butchered for a meal. Paintings can’t convey blisters and calluses, the full measure of agony and fear, or broken hearts grieving the loss of loved ones.

Despite hardships, fear of the known and the unknown, the small band resolved to care for one another, to remain united and to survive.

Because the past is always part of the present, we stand as beneficiaries of those who have gone before. What the early settlers left us was not monetary wealth, but priceless models of courage, tenacity, perseverance and faith. So, how about a moment of thanks this Thanksgiving for those who laid cornerstones to our foundation?