today's interesting and timely fact

Did you know that Pilgrims and Puritans were two different things?

According to A New Age Now Begins: A People's History of the American Revolution, by Page Smith (McGraw-Hill, 1976), the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock were a group of Calvinists called "Brownists" (after their leader) or "Separatists" (after their religious beliefs) who wished to separate from the Anglican Church. They originally relocated to Holland, but left for the New World because they were afraid their children would be tempted by "the great licentiousness of the youth in that countrie, and the manifold temptations of the place...draw[ing them] away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses" (p. 16). The staid and sensible Dutch as Satanists!

Puritans arrived in New England a decade later. What set them apart from Pilgrims was (a) social class (Pilgrims were mostly farmers and workmen; Puritans included more educated and even wealthy men), (b) their desire to remain with the Church of England while at the same time "purifying" it by establishing a new covenant with God in the New World; and (c) some of them--Massachusetts Bay Company, for example--were set up as commercial ventures and funded by stockholders in the home country (pp. 19-20).

So, with American Thanksgiving approaching, consider that we have a tradition made up of Virginia settlers (Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith at Jamestown), Puritans as a symbol of old New England, and Pilgrims dining with Squanto and Massasoit at the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth.