Maybe America got it all wrong, this Thanksgiving thing.
Not because every third grader knows the heart-rending story of the Plymouth pilgrims and their Massachusetts Bay Colony. Not because the lessons of pilgrim faith in the face of unimaginable adversity came to define the essence of American gratitude.
It is because those pilgrims ... got all the ink.
And the credit.
Some historians have argued that the models for our First Thanksgiving were not, in fact, the first to live it. Everything the Massachusetts pilgrims endured in 1621 was borne years earlier - beginning in 1607, to be precise -- by the settlers of Jamestown. In Virginia.
The hardship of a pilgrimage? Check.
Settlement in a strange and hostile place? Check.
Starving times and death? Indian aid and a first harvest? A moment of complete and unreserved thanks?
Check. Check. Check.
We're alive, thanks be! Alive!
Jamestown had all the elements of the Thanksgiving we know. It withstood malaria and hunger, and defections to Native American villages. More than 50 people died within months of setting foot in the New World. By 1610, nine out of every 10 people, once so determined to carve out a new colony, were dead.
As for those allegations of mutiny that left Capt. John Smith in chains? That's just a holiday bonus, a footnote in the Virginia thanksgiving story.
I never really thought about Jamestown in a Thanksgiving context until last year, when a retired historian convinced me to ponder it.
"How does history replace Virginia with New England? " she wrote in response to a story about Plymouth hardships. "Who wrote the history of America? The early accepted writers happened to be from Harvard and Yale."
In New England.
There is no question she was right. Because history is not what happens. History is what is written.
She was right about Jamestown, too.
It could stake a valid claim on the first thanksgiving, years before the First Thanksgiving.
But that does not weaken America's Thanksgiving legend. No. It does not dilute the story or spoil the meaning. If anything, it does exactly the opposite.
Because those who suffer first don't own a patent on suffering. And those who suffer worst cannot call suffering their own.
And that, when you get right down to it, is what makes Thanksgiving real still. It happened and it keeps on happening, some way somehow. That is the Thanksgiving effect.
Thanksgiving is Jamestown and Plymouth. It is Gettysburg and Iwo Jima. It is Khe Sanh and it is Fallujah. It is survival after the great Chicago fire, healing after Hurricane Katrina, or stepping into the rubble after any of the tornadoes that plagued this state.
Thanksgiving is being grateful for what you have, even when you have little. In Birmingham and Mobile and Huntsville.
It is standing up after you've lost a job, or a family member, or just a game. It is daring to move on when it's hard to move at all. It is daring to get out of bed when the day itself is daunting.
So no. America did not get this Thanksgiving thing wrong after all.
Thanksgiving is forever, whether it started in 1607 or 1621 or in 1863, when it became a holiday. It can never be confined to a single moment.
Thanksgiving is one thing, one beautiful, timeless thing, that America got absolutely right.
John Archibald's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays in The Birmingham News, and even more often than that on al.com. Email him at email@example.com