Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday. As seen in most elementary schools, one would never guess that, however. Small children parade up and down the hallways in feather headdresses and construction paper hats with buckles. They trace their hands to make turkeys and color pictures of the Mayflower. The story we teach them is straightforward as well. Unfortunately, it's inaccurate. Very little of what we do in elementary schools regarding Thanksgiving is accurate.

We give credit to Pilgrims in New England with celebrating the first Thanksgiving in 1621. However, there were documented celebrations of thanksgiving in many other areas prior to this and likely many for which we have no documentation. Pilgrim children did not wear hats with buckles on them and Native Americans in New England did not wear feather headdresses. I don't think our elementary school children would be the only ones surprised by these facts.

There is no other holiday with which I struggle as much as I do with Thanksgiving. As a day to give thanks, to recognize all that we have, it is a day I love to share with students. When it comes to the actual history of Thanksgiving, it is much tougher. Attempting to help young children understand the realities of the interactions between settlers and Native Americans is a monumental task. It is also a task I don't believe to be developmentally appropriate for early elementary school students.

There are many wonderful places to look for useful information for planning lessons throughout the elementary years. Plimoth Plantation has several good resources. An interactive You are the Historian takes students through myths and facts, daily life for Pilgrims and Native Americans, and the lead-up to 1621. There are also several interesting articles about Thanksgiving. However, Berkeley Plantation on the James River in Virginia also claims to have celebrated the first official Thanksgiving.

For primary source resources, the Library of Congress has a collection that includes letters and proclamations about Thanksgiving, photographs of Thanksgiving celebrations, and paintings depicting artists' interpretations of the Plimoth Thanksgiving. For the history of Thanksgiving as a holiday the Smithsonian has a brief, well-written article.

As for my 1st graders, this year we'll be reading Eve Bunting's How Many Days to America? A Thanksgiving Story. This book tells the story of a young family hurriedly leaving a Caribbean nation, facing many challenges in an attempt to reach America. It's a beautiful tale of giving thanks. We'll share our reasons to be thankful and celebrate them.

Is there a real first Thanksgiving?

According to resources from the Library of Congress, the Plymouth colonists were latecomers to the scene. The Library's Wise Guide explains that Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and 1,500 men gave thanks in 1541 in the present-day Texas Panhandle. French Huguenot colonists celebrated in Florida in 1564, and Jamestown settlers gave thanks in 1610—in fact, many actually consider this the first Thanksgiving. Visit the American Memory Learning Page and search for Thanksgiving to gather resources, timelines, and primary source sets on Thanksgiving in American Memory.

Historians at Plimoth Plantation are adamant that the harvest celebration held in 1621, often called the First Thanksgiving, wasn't. Instead, they place the first observance in Massachusetts in mid-July, 1623, after a Day of Humiliation and Fasting, during which these early colonists sought prayerful relief from a series of misfortunes threatening the settlement. (Visit Plimoth Plantation's interactive exercise emphasizing historical thinking: You are the Historian: Investigating the First Thanksgiving—especially excellent for elementary and middle school.)

The National Park Service helps us move us quickly to the indisputable date of 1863 as the establishment of the holiday as an annual event—the date when President Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving Day Proclamation. Technically, his proclamation only affected the District of Columbia and federal employees, but governors throughout the Union followed suit. (Note, however, that the Park Service advocates 1621 as the first Thanksgiving!) Check the White House website during the week of November 22, 2009, to read this year's Presidential Proclamation.

Backstory with the American History Guys takes a lively look at solid historical evidence about the history of Thanksgiving. The three historians who host this radio program talk among themselves and with guests about how holiday traditions and celebrations have changed since those first days of thanksgiving. As American as Pumpkin Pie: A History of Thanksgiving points out that "when we sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, we think we know what we’re commemorating. But if an actual Pilgrim were to attend your Thanksgiving, chances are he’d be stunned, and a little disgusted, by what he saw."

Listen to historian James McWilliams discussing why the Puritans would have turned up their noses at our traditional Thanksgiving foods, religion scholar Anne Blue Wills explaining the 19th-century origins of our modern holiday, and legendary NFL quarterback Roger Staubach describing what it was like to spend every Thanksgiving on the football field—about a century after the first Thanksgiving Day championship playoff in 1876. Read how the the industrial revolution and large-scale migration and immigration in the 19th-century turned Thanksgiving into a holiday of family homecoming.

Wills's discussion is accompanied by an audio slideshow of primary sources, and you'll find links to a wealth of other primary and secondary materials: the timeline of thanksgiving celebrations from the Library of Congress, an article on the agricultural challenges of Europeans in the New World, a translation of an Iroquois prayer of Thanksgiving, and more.

On the Clearinghouse site, test yourself with the weekly quiz, Thanksgiving Dinner in 1943, and visit the Ask-a-Historian archive , to find the answer to the question, "At the first Thanksgiving did the Pilgrims/Native Americans eat roasted kernels of corn or popped corn, or was there no corn served in that matter at all?" (Note that our Clearinghouse historian doesn't pinpoint a date!)

And Happy Thanksgiving!