Read it through once

It might have seemed appropriate for the Pilgrims to formalize their thanks to God with a solemn day of thanksgiving. Instead, they opted for an older mode of thanksgiving known as Harvest Home. Most of them as boys had experienced the secular revelry of Harvest Home, when, after the main grain crop was ingathered, it was cakes and ale and hang the cost. Earlier in the sixteenth century it had been so rowdy during harvest time that Henry VIII had attacked the numerous feasts that prevented farmers from “taking the opportunity of good and serene weather offered upon the same in time of harvest.” So by the late 1500s the holiday was begun only after the harvest was safely home. Then came day after day of revelry, sports and feasts. As Thomas Tusser, the Elizabethan farmer-poet, described it: