Ah, the holidays. Thanksgiving is my favorite. It is not nearly as commercial as Christmas, Halloween, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day or even Ascension Sunday for that matter.

Nothing beats the purity of getting together with the family to reflect on how lucky we really are, eat the best meal of the year and occasionally point the finger of blame for our dysfunction squarely at everyone in attendance.

The only drawback to Thanksgiving is the great many misconceptions that surround it. Whenever researchers go looking for how this holiday got started, they inevitably come up with the wackiest of theories like “the pilgrims invented it.”

Here is the problem with this little theory: When looking to see how Thanksgiving got rolling, the people want to know that it was white folks that started it. So, any time any groups of folks got together to have a banquet for any reason and somebody said a prayer (like that was hard to find among a wild band of Calvinists) they get half the credit for inventing Thanksgiving.

One theory is that the pilgrims got the idea from the Hebrews. From the time of Moses, the Israelites used to have a little festival after the harvest to praise Jehovah for delivering them from Egypt. Sounds good, doesn’t it? What a ridiculous stretch of the imagination.

This is often given as the justification Governor Bradford of the Plymouth colony must have used for the “first” Thanksgiving celebration.

I don’t buy it. I never have, and I never will. There is no tribe of Indians on this continent that didn’t celebrate the harvest with a feast. If Bradford “got the idea” from anyone, it was Squanto.

We all know those Puritans were starving to death. They couldn’t grow corn to save their lives, and if it hadn’t been for Squanto, the last of the Pawtuxet Indians, and his skill as a farmer, those pilgrims would have died sure as they wore funky hats and hated Injuns.

Historians are all too happy to give credit to the intrepid white land-grabbers of this nation’s past. Quite frankly, I don’t see why anyone should give them any credit they don’t deserve. If it weren’t for dumb luck and the fact that the rest of the Pawtuxet had been wiped out by another fabulous gift of the English, smallpox, Squanto would probably have been happily engaged in the business of living it up with the rest of the tribe.

The image of Puritans and Indians happily gathered together to chow down and play games is ludicrous. Bradford invited Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoags to come by himself to seal a peace treaty deal Squanto set up for him. The cheeky savage invited 90 of his best buddies to come with him, and you just know it was because he was afraid of getting jacked or he would have brought some women. Let’s face it. He wasn’t counting on scoring with any of those uptight Puritan fishwives.

One of the very first peace treaties lasted about 20 years because that’s how long it took these losers to get enough supplies, stores and guts to start killing the peace-loving Wampanoags.

Of course, the Indians provided most of the food, too. Massasoit’s men killed five deer for the feast. Now that’s a whole lot of venison. Considering the Indians disdain for wastefulness, you can bet good money this meat was essential to the feed. Even if it wasn’t, the corn was Squanto’s, and I can’t imagine a Pilgrim knowing what to do with the stuff.

Even all the fanciful versions of Puritanical generosity include Indian bread, wild roots, shellfish and geese. Can you honestly imagine anyone bagging geese with a blunderbuss? Bows and arrows are much more accurate over long ranges. And what about the shellfish? Bradford and his band of loonies couldn’t have been bothered to get THEIR knickers wet.

In the years that followed, the colonists often celebrated Thanksgiving every time they managed to wipe out another tribe or grab a few more acres of land.

Of course, none of this explains why the Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving, too. Their theories are even more uncertain. One even credits the French, and that has to be wrong.

This candy-coated nonsense we’ve all been fed since were making turkeys out of hand prints in grade school does a mean disservice to people who truly knew what it meant to give thanks to the Great Spirit for the bounty of the land.

Still and all, I like Thanksgiving the best. If we have all deluded ourselves into thinking it’s just about sweetness and light and good family values, there are worse things to be deluded about.

So this holiday season, chow down, feel blessed, watch football, blame grandma for your inability to commit, fall asleep on the couch and give a little credit where credit is due.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.