The Pilgrims ate fish.

Long before they were brave enough to venture into the forests for game, they ate fish. Before they were taught by Native Americans how to grow the dappled amber grains of Indian corn -- by fertilizing it with fish -- the Pilgrims fished the turquoise waves.

Only turkeys eat turkey for T-day. The Pilgrim's salvation that first year was the miracle of the fishes and the loaves of cornbread.

Edward Winslow's December 1621 letter to a friend in England provides the only contemporaneous menu of Plymouth Colony's first Thanksgiving. And, sure, he wrote, in part, "our governor sent four men on fowling." Twenty years after the fact Gov. William Bradford himself wrote a history where, sure, he did recall, "besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys."

But in the event, the turkeys weren't turkeys anyway. The Pilgrims used the term "wild turkey" to represent all sorts of wild fowl -- duck, goose, crane, swan, partridge. The Pilgrims also ate eagles (which Winslow said "tasted like mutton") and seals.

But Winslow had more to say of fish than fowl. "(W)e have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter; we have mussels and othus at our doors: oysters we have none near, but we can have them brought by the Indians when we will."

Some people think the misprint "othus" should read "cockles" (alive, alive-o!), others think "clams." Nobody thinks "turkeys."

There is no turkey flying the weathervane atop the Massachusetts Statehouse, and it is not Cape Turkey that flexes into the bleak North Atlantic.

The Pilgrims gave thanks to God and cod for making it through that first year.

The peoples, original and new, of the Northeast were as much made of fish as the indigenous cultures and interlopers of the Northwest.

There is a grace in seeing the plain beauty and bounty "at our doors," and a simple "Thank you, Bay. Thank you, Inlet. Thank you, Gulf" might well grace our tables on Thanksgiving. Especially if our tables are set from the sea.

A couple of weeks ago on the dreamy dreary drive to school my younger daughter looked out on the lights and decorations and said, "They forgot. Halloween's over and everybody's getting ready for Christmas and they're not even thinking about Thanksgiving."

Certainly not thinking as well as first-graders.

Americans invented Thanksgiving (after the Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, Chinese, Egyptians and Indians -- the ones from India) and still we do a lousy job celebrating our archetypal holiday. It's that word that Americans can only stutter. Th-th-thanks. And the idea we stumble over. Give?!

America, the land of I-want, is the engine of modern consumptive Christmas, fast on the heels of sucrose-fueled gimme-candy-corn Halloween. We never seem to slow down to say thanks.

As befits the celebration of an event that took place on an uncertain date, Thanksgiving has jumped around from Lincoln's last Thursday to FDR's third Thursday to the current fourth Thursday in November. That last Thursday date was scrapped, by the way, because it could possibly fall on a fifth Thursday and hence make for a too-short Christmas shopping season.

Maybe Christmas should just come first -- please, and then thank you.

One November back when Cafe Cups was still in the crazy Picasso warp of the old Homer News building, Mark Brinster invented a Thanksgiving dinner of leftover friends and made a magic at the quiet, closed, and darkened restaurant.

There were many simple pleasures at that potluck potlatch, and a treasure I brought -- silver salmon from the autumnal August subsistence nets between Mud Bay and Miller's Landing. Stuffed with cornbread and oysters and clams, it was a handsome offering of a life gone off, grown up and come back to these shores to nourish us. It seemed easy to say thanks for that. I hope it might be as easy again this year.

Thank you, fishes. Thank you, friends.

Columnist Geo Beach can be reached at news@homernews.com