‘Some of our students came here not knowing a soul.’ : This Class Can Identify With Pilgrims

Wednesday’s lesson at Finley School in Westminster--the origin and traditions of Thanksgiving--was the usual classroom fare for the season. What made it unique were the students.

“We find our students are very interested in the story of the Pilgrims,” said Linda Kuntzman, an administrator at the school. “They can understand leaving home and family and friends and going into a strange new land. Some of our students came here not knowing a soul.”

The students in Room 10, a room scaled for small children, are adults from Mexico, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, Germany, Holland, Italy, Taiwan, China and Vietnam. Most have been in the United States less than a year and are taking this Coastline Community College class to learn English.

But they are also being taught about American traditions because customs that American natives take for granted can be puzzling to newcomers. For example, said one instructor, “one student asked us about this Thanksgiving tradition ‘when a turkey is offered up to your God.’ ”

Trying to explain the holiday, Adeline Bingham told her 22 students: “It’s not only supposed to be a feast day--a day when you eat too much--but a day of evaluating and a day to look back.”

On the other hand, she said, “tradition is, you have to eat too much. Then you have to moan and groan all afternoon about how bad you feel. And maybe you take a nap.”

Bingham passed around a 14-paragraph summary of Thanksgiving history that recounted the deadly first winter for the Mayflower Pilgrims and that first great harvest feast in the autumn of 1621, attended by the survivors and their Indian benefactors. The five surviving Pilgrim women did all the cooking and the men played games, according to the summary.

“Now the game is football, but the men just watch it on TV,” Bingham said. “In fact, if you serve the dinner while the game is on, you can get into trouble.”

Bingham handed out traditional menus and recipes, but the food itself was waiting in the campus cafeteria for the students to taste. Instructors shared the tasks of preparing turkey, stuffing, cranberry salad, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie with whipped cream and hot spiced cider--enough for a good snack but not a feast.

This demonstration of tradition has become a tradition itself at the school, which is officially the college’s Westminster Center and located in a former elementary school. The process is reversed at Christmas, when students bring samples of their native dishes.

“We’re more alike than different,” Bingham told her students. “Every culture has some kind of harvest festival. I hope you will keep your traditions and pass them to your children but also try the new ones, and together we’ll have something better than we had by ourselves.”