Frankly, I hoped for a different outcome to our recent presidential election. I woke up on Nov. 6 feeling disappointed, sleepy, and grumpy.

To make life more challenging, I needed to prepare a talk to give to the Ashfield Council on Aging the next day about Thanksgiving. The group was expecting me to be funny … or at the very least upbeat. I didn’t feel upbeat. Or thankful.

Even so, as I thought about Thanksgiving, I realized that its history might provide the balm I needed.

I learned from two past Thanksgivings. The first was the so-called “First Thanksgiving,” the three-day feast shared in 1621 by the English settlers of Plimoth Plantation and their Wampanoag hosts.

The myth of this event has undergone challenges in recent years, thanks to new scholarship and to the inclusion of more diverse voices in the telling of the American story.

We now know that the celebration wasn’t necessarily the first Thanksgiving in America. Earlier challengers to this title have been identified in Texas, Florida, Maine, and Virginia.

The colonists and the Native Americans were as much keeping a wary eye on each other as offering friendship. Moreover, that event in Plymouth by no means started a regular tradition. The Thanksgiving that we celebrate is more or less a 19th-century invention.

Many Native Americans justifiably resent the idea of a holiday that celebrates the survival of the English on these shores — and the help given to them by the Wampanoag tribe.

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Each year on Thanksgiving the United American Indians of New England organize a National Day of Mourning in Plymouth to remember the slaughter, intentional and unintentional, of Native Americans by European Americans.

I don’t want to downplay the importance of any of these questions about the traditional story of foreign-born and Indigenous Americans giving thanks while sharing the fruits of the harvest in Plymouth. I believe that history is most meaningful when it is most complete.

Nevertheless, I do believe that what the curators at PlimothPatuxet call “the harvest celebration in 1621” is an important story for all Americans, both as a real historical event and as a symbol.

As a real historical event it commemorates at least limited cooperation between Europeans and Native Americans. The two groups, particularly the Europeans, went on to do their best to wipe each other out.

During their early days together, and particularly during the three days of the harvest festival in 1621, however, they shared food, acknowledged the bounty of nature, and tried to some degree to communicate with each other.

Like personal moments, historical moments may be great without being perfect. This was one such moment.

The story of the “first” Thanksgiving (not just the real event, but the myth) also shows us what we Americans can accomplish if we try to find commonality and share what we have.

The other Thanksgiving story from which I learned was the one institutionalized by Abraham Lincoln.

In November 1863, a week after writing and reciting the Gettysburg Address, our 16th president led Americans in celebrating our first National Day of Thanksgiving.

States and communities had celebrated their own days of Thanksgiving for a couple of centuries by then. It was Lincoln who nationalized the holiday and identified it as the last Thursday in November. (In 1941 it became the fourth Thursday rather than the last.)

The writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale had campaigned unsuccessfully for such a day with governors and presidents beginning in the 1830s.

Hale, now best known as the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” was a prominent writer and edited the most popular magazine of the mid-19th century, ”Godey’s Lady’s Book.” Despite her prominence, she was unsuccessful in her crusade for a national Thanksgiving until she proposed the idea to Lincoln.

It took Lincoln’s genius to identify Thanksgiving as a quintessentially American holiday, one that was particularly appropriate to a nation at war.

It is when we are feeling the most stress that we have the greatest need to be grateful. Lincoln realized that a nation at war needed to stop, take stock of its blessings, and express gratitude for them — perhaps even more than a nation at peace.

As we approach Thanksgiving in this year of 2024 — and the inauguration of a new/old president in 2025 — we aren’t at war. Nevertheless, many of us are at odds.

Remembering and being thankful for our blessings and our commonalities should help us come together as a nation once more.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving meals can feel heavy. I always like to add a green salad to my menu for that day. The addition of cranberries helps the dish feel authentically American. We aren’t certain that cranberries were on the Thanksgiving menu in 1621, but these berries abounded in bogs near Plymouth.

Ingredients:

for the dressing:

4 tablespoons cider vinegar

4 tablespoons maple syrup

½ teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 clove garlic, minced

1 teaspoon water

1 teaspoon salt

ground pepper to taste

10 tablespoons walnut, pecan oil

for the salad:

½ pound uncooked spinach leaves (more if you like)

½ cup walnut or pecan halves (more if you like)

1 apple (your choice of variety), cored and sliced but not peeled

½ small red onion, chopped into rings or pieces

½ cup crumbled feta or blue cheese (more if you like; omit for a lighter salad)

3 strips cooked bacon, crumbled (optional)

¼ cup dried cranberries (more if you like)

Instructions:

First, make the dressing. In a 2-cup mason jar combine the vinegar, maple syrup, mustard, garlic, water, salt, and pepper. Shake well. Slowly whisk in the oil.

Wash the spinach thoroughly and dry it.

Place the nuts in a small frying pan, and toast them over low heat for a few minutes, stirring constantly, to release their oils. Take the pan off the heat.

Just before you are ready to eat, slice the apple. In a salad bowl, combine the spinach, onion slices, toasted nuts, apple slices, cheese, bacon (if using), and cranberries.

Shake the dressing, and pour about a quarter of it onto the salad. Toss the salad well but carefully. Serves 6.

You will have enough dressing for several salads. Refrigerate the dressing between uses, and make sure to bring it to room temperature and shake it well before you re-use it.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.